


The Air Stings Like Autumn

by ELG



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-20
Updated: 2013-03-20
Packaged: 2017-12-05 22:46:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 80,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/728751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ELG/pseuds/ELG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam Seaborn is kidnapped by a group of white supremacists. Sam Seaborn-centric hurt-comfort.<br/>ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Quotes from ‘Sorrow Home’ from ‘This Is My Century New and Collected Poems’ by Margaret Walker (1989), (c) The University of Georgia Press, 1989; and ‘Palo Alto: The Marshes’ from ‘Field Guide’ by Robert Hass (1973) (c) Yale University Press, 1998. Warnings: Violence, some bad language, some sexual references including references to sexual violence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> An AU S6 fic in which things happened very differently. (NB This fic completely ignore series continuity after S5 because the person it was written for hasn’t seen S5 and the person who wrote it was still waiting for S6 to come out on DVD at the time.)

> In California in the early Spring,  
>  there are pale yellow mornings  
>  when the mist burns slowly into day.  
>  The air stings  
>  like autumn, clarifies  
>  like pain.
> 
> Well, I have dreamed this coast myself. 
> 
> _Robert Hass_ ,  
>  ‘Palo Alto: The Marshes’ from _Field Guide_

##### Prologue

Sam had not found the California of his dreams. He wondered sometimes why he had come back here. To get himself elected to the United States Senate or to find the childhood he had so carelessly lost in the space of a single phone-call? He could run for office here, and win, and yet his father would never be the man he had once thought him. The reasons why he had not been there, on sports days, and concert nights, and sometimes even on birthdays, could not be ennobled by any act of his son. He could not find a way to make it true that, after all, there had been a case the man was fighting; some injustice he was striving to right. No, in the end, there had been another woman, and too many lies to count. The story was so old that it felt like a re-run on the first time of telling. 

He had not won the California 47th. He had thought that something would be bound to take place that made that happen; that there would be a reward for standing up for one’s principles. Defeat had been so bitter, perhaps, because it had been so long since he had tasted it. Even here, in this moment, poised at the break of a new day in which he was determined to be youthful and energetic and to tell people why they should vote for what he believed in, even if it wasn’t, necessarily, what they believed in, he wondered how much he really wanted this. Was this like retaking an exam even though he didn’t actually need the qualification it would give him just because he was stung he hadn’t managed an ‘A’ on the first attempt? Or did he really, truly _want_ this? He wanted to be where decisions were made, policies formulated, in the room with the eagle seal on the floor. Yet, bizarrely, he had never felt so far away from government. Perhaps because he _was_ so far away from government; on the wrong coast, looking out at this pale yellow morning, the sea mist already beginning to burn off the shore. Telling himself that if he won this election he would be a huge step closer to government didn’t seem to have the same resonance when he had stood in the room with the eagle seal on the floor and the secret service agents outside the too many windows, every single day, without being an elected official, and yet policies had sometimes been formulated because of him. How long would it take to get to where he had already been by this route? And how lonely a path was it going to seem when he had once had so much companionship upon the way?

He missed Josh, fiercely, sometimes. Remembered his younger self standing on the sidewalk, telling the man to his face how much he was missed. Their nightly calls felt like a link to everything he had lost. And yet he could go back if he wanted to; he wasn’t sure if there was anything stopping him; if it would be a terrible mistake, borne of cowardice, or the best move he’d ever made. In the meantime, there was this second election to fight, energy to be summoned, a tie to be selected. There was five minutes before Steve would be knocking on the door and telling him the day’s agenda. Sam took a moment just to look out at the sea. It was true that he had dreamed this coast for years; dreamed of taking political office, here, in the place where he was born. He was just not certain if the dream had any substance in the pale lemon-yellow light of day, or if, in the end, it was better burned off like mist.

“Sam…?”

He jumped at the knock on the door, hastily snatching up one of the ties he had been selecting and knotting it. Steve had always been impatient and Sam had annoyed him half a dozen times on the previous day by needing clarification where he had felt none was necessary. It had already been made clear to him that, while it was his job to run _in_ the campaign, it was Steve’s job to run it. And him. So far he had been allowed to write his own speeches, say more or less his own words, but there had been a lot of blue-pencilling all the same. Whoever the people of Orange County voted for in the end, whatever name they thought they were selecting, Sam was not certain, that they would be voting for him. He was not certain that Steven Wynn or the Democratic Party was going to let Sam Seaborn actually appear in this race at all if it could instead put forward a facsimile who did as he was told and said what he didn’t entirely believe, and did all that was required to get elected. 

“Seaborn…?”

Steve’s middle school bark. Sometimes he forgot that Sam was the candidate and the one to whom the campaign manager was meant to defer. Sometimes, Sam just knew that what Steve saw when he looked at him, was that annoying kid he’d used to beat up in recess.

 _You chose this_ , Sam reminded himself as he opened the door, plastering on a morning smile so Steve couldn’t accuse him of not being in the game. As Steve began to tell him about the day’s agenda, taking Sam by the arm and what felt a little like frog-marching him towards his first public meeting, Sam wondered if he had chosen this, after all, if there had ever truly been a moment when he had chosen to run for this particular office, or if, rather, events had simply overwhelmed him like a shipwreck, leaving him stranded on entirely the wrong coast….

 

_The present_

It was the waiting that was so unbearable. Mike Caspar had said it would be soon now, within the hour, and Josh found he was walking the corridors if for no other reason than that he could not stand to sit in his office for one more minute. Over the past six days he had come to associate it with phones that kept ringing with the wrong information; aides and senators and the everyday matters of his office, and for the most part none of it had been quite difficult enough. None of it had demanded so much of his attention that he could forget the other thing; the real reason why he didn’t like to move too far away from his phone, just in case…

If Toby had asked him, angrily or sympathetically – with Toby one never knew – ‘Just in case _what_ …?’ he would have had to admit it was Sam he was waiting to hear from. Not Mike Caspar, not Leo, but a Sam who had somehow got himself out and staggered to a payphone somewhere and needed Josh to come and pick him up. That was why it felt so wrong to be here, on the wrong side of the country. He should have been there, in California, where he could go and rescue Sam if he called him. Knowing it was absurd hadn’t stopped every other call he’d had in the past six days from being a painful disappointment, leaving a bitter taste in his mouth every time he tried to converse.

A few hours ago he’d been convinced that Sam was dead and thought that he was starting to accept it, but now he realized that there was an inner pendulum that kept swinging back to optimism, over which he had no control. Something within him wasn’t able to accept that Sam was probably dead. He wondered if it ever would; even if they brought him proof, if some part of him would always be waiting to see Sam on the street somewhere, thinking when the phone rang that it must be him on the other end of the line.

He walked past Toby’s office and saw that Toby was just sitting there, not even pretending to type or to shuffle papers, the way he usually did when he saw someone was looking. He was just staring into the abyss of all the different possibilities, while simultaneously trying to strangle hope – so that it wouldn’t crush him too completely when they received the confirmation they all feared. 

Donna was still doggedly trying to work. Josh saw the droplets splashing onto her keyboard as she did so; she kept blinking to clear her eyes, gamely trying to type up that pointless memo he didn’t remember drafting. But it was something to occupy her; to make another minute crawl past that wasn’t entirely consumed with the horror of ‘what if’. For the first time in his life he envied secretaries. No doubt Margaret and Ginger and Carol had also found themselves something to do. He, Josh Lyman, should have had something to do. There should have been a crisis. If the Senate or the House of Representative or the Republicans had a shred of decency in them they would have manufactured a crisis that demanded all of his attention this week. Instead they had backed off and refused to make political capital out of the fact no one in the West Wing had his or her head in the game. Bastards. 

Josh strode into CJ’s office, where she had long since gone past the point of trying to do anything except rock in anxiety.

“Let’s invade somewhere,” Josh suggested.

“What?” She looked up at him and he wondered how long it was since she had slept. Then he remembered that glimpse of himself he’d seen in the mirror this morning as he tried to shave with a hand that shook with anger and fear; that long pause as he told himself that there could still be a happy ending to this story; that it wasn’t necessarily the case that Sam was never again going to stand in his apartment, bubbling over with enthusiasm about something, until a hungover Josh threatened to throw him out of a window if he didn’t dial down the nauseatingly optimistic good cheer.

“Let’s invade some country that’s pissing us off.”

CJ moistened her dry lips. “Just to pass the time?”

“Pretty much.”

“Okay, I’m in. What are you thinking? Canada?”

Josh shrugged. “Well, it’s close. Makes it easier to mobilize the troops when they don’t have so far to travel.”

“A lot of Canadians speak French in a particularly supercilious way. I’m sure we could work that up as an act of treason against the United States.”

“Plus, they tried to annex Donna. Moving the borders like that.”

“I think it was INS that moved the borders actually, Josh, but it’s as good a reason as any. Oh wait! The seal pups. Let’s go to war over the seal pups.”

There was no reason at all why seal pups should have forced that image of Sam into his mind; Sam wasn’t particularly small or fluffy. But now he was seeing the ice red with Sam’s blood, his skull cracked. He staggered and CJ was out of her chair in an instant and holding his arm. “It can’t be much longer now.”

“But then it’s over.” Josh swallowed hard. “And there’s no more hope. At least now we can think he could still…”

“He _could_ still be alive, Josh.” CJ slipped her hand into his. “They may not have….”

“He can identify them. People like that aren’t going to think twice about pulling the trigger. I don’t think Sam being white is going to stop them.” _It didn’t stop people like them from shooting me_. He snatched a breath that could barely make it past the constriction in his chest. “They’re going to put a bullet in the back of his head, CJ.” Seeing her pale with horror, he realized how appallingly insensitive he had just been. It wasn’t as if he was the only one scared right now. He clutched at her hand. “CJ, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…. Maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll – ” He breathed again. “Mike Caspar’s a good man. He knows what he’s doing. If anyone can get Sam out alive then it’s – ”

She gave a little gasp as she looked over his shoulder and he turned to find that Leo was walking towards them. The air seemed to have become thick and glutinous, all the oxygen sucked out of it and replaced with syrup. He felt as if he was encased in liquid, could only move in slow motion, thoughts sluggish as molasses. Donna stopped typing and looked up, pleading with Leo to have some good news. Toby was standing in the door of his office, fingers gripping the frame so tightly they were white. His voice was rough: “Well…?”

Leo said: “They’re airlifting him to a hospital. He’s not in the best of shape and at the moment he’s unconscious. But he’s alive.”

Josh staggered and clutched at the door. He could hear hissing and felt as if he were falling into a tunnel of white light. _Sam’s alive. Sam’s alive. Sam’s alive…._ He only realized he was saying it out loud when CJ grabbed at his arm.

“Josh, if you faint like a girl, I swear I’m going to tell Sam the second he wakes up.”

“Sam’s _alive_ ….” The floor hit his knees with unnecessary force and he found everything was blurred and smeared and dissolving but he had the biggest, stupidest smile on his face he’d ever known. He had time to think: _I need to buy Tracy McAllister the best Junior Prom dress ever_ before he passed out.

***

_Six days earlier_

Josiah Edward Bartlet, graduate of the LSE, Doctor of Economics, Professor of Humane Letters, winner of the Nobel Prize, and currently President of the United States, was thinking that today was going to be a good day. It was a cold crisp April day, the kind that always made him expand his lungs and walk briskly and think how much he missed New Hampshire. Definitely the kind of day where he wanted to be watching the greenness coming back into the land, rather than stuck in Washington DC, but even behind man-made walls he still believed he could feel the sap rising in every National Park across the land. This was the kind of day that made him feel energized and ready for anything, and not at all like a man suffering from relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis.

As Leo entered the room, Jed started talking about Yosemite, and then, as Leo’s expression reached him, said: “I know that look and you’re not going to bring me down today, Leo, I swear. I have designated this a Good Day, and if I, as the President of the United States, cannot…” Then he got Leo’s expression properly in focus and realized it was much, much worse than he had originally thought. His first thought was for Abby and the girls, but then he realized he had seen Abby and Zoey in the Residence only a few minutes ago. He had spoken to Ellie last night and Elizabeth the previous afternoon. “What is it?” 

“It’s Sam Seaborn.” Leo looked suddenly much older than he usually did; the lines of tension around his eyes definitely looking as if they were here for keeps. “He’s been kidnapped, the signs are by white supremacists. They did it at gun point – forced him into the trunk of their car.”

Jed had a memory of himself standing in that beautiful cathedral railing at God. Asking if Josh Lyman had been a warning shot. Apparently he had. Apparently none of his adopted sons were safe from the wrath of a vengeful god; or else, perhaps, more realistically, his adopted sons, Charlie, Josh, Sam, were all the kind of people who never backed away from a fight.

“In California?”

“Yes, in Orange County.” Leo said: “Mike Caspar’s on it. They have the kidnap on video camera. They’re going to find him, Mister President. This is what the FBI do.”

He thought of what they had failed to do in the past and turned away. Leo was there at his elbow in an instant, trying to keep him focused. “Sam had been receiving threats after that speech he gave…. He knew this was a possibility.”

Jed sat down heavily, feeling like a man whose father had never loved him because he had been too smart, and exactly like a man with relapsing remitting MS. “We should have had him handcuffed to Ron a week ago. Insisted he had some Secret Service protection.”

“He didn’t want special treatment just because he used to work for the President.”

“I know.” Jed gazed into Leo’s eyes and saw that he was in just as much pain as he was. “But do you honestly think they would have kidnapped him if he _hadn’t_ once worked for the President?”

“Yes, sir. I really think they would.”

Jed straightened his shoulders. “Get him back, Leo. I don’t care how many men it takes. Get him back alive.”

***

_Ten days earlier_

Josh was still thinking about Sam’s speech. He never got tired of marveling at how Sam had managed to hang onto his sweetness, his bordering-on-naïve belief in the basic goodness of the human race, but there was something about Sam when he unveiled that steel core of his that always wanted to make Josh stand up and applaud. 

White supremacists had fire-bombed a Baptist church in Orange County, killing three and wounding twelve. A six year old boy was still undergoing surgery to repair a ruptured pulmonary artery – Josh couldn’t think of that without putting a hand to his own scar – a seventy-six year old grandmother was still considered ‘critical’. All of the dead and wounded had been black. Reporters had stuck the microphones under second-time congressional candidate Sam Seaborn to ask for his response. Sam was the only person Josh knew apart from the President who could extemporize at the speed of a submachine gun in passionate, poetic, spine-tingling prose. By the end of Sam’s speech, the people of the world could be in no doubt that racists and murderers did not speak for the people of California, they would not know the protection of the people of California, that these bombers were cowards and terrorists who would find no allies in any legitimate political party, and that whether Sam Seaborn or his Republican opponent were elected to congress by the people of Orange County, the outcome for the cowardly murderers who sought to practice genocide upon their fellow Americans would be the same. No one had any tolerance left for the intolerable. 

There had been a lot more. Also, like President Bartlet, Sam had never really seen the use of using one word when there were fifteen words enticing him like sweets in a candy store. But every word had been intelligent and lyrical and measured and _passionate_ , carried on by the irresistible flow of Samuel Seaborn’s just rage. 

Toby had been angry with him for going all bi-partisan on them when he was supposed to be running for Congress. Donna had insisted some things were more important than party politics. Toby had said – loudly – that being above party politics was a luxury that a Democrat running for office in Orange County didn’t get to enjoy. But the media had been impressed by Sam; most of all, Josh suspected, by his palpable honesty. He wasn’t being Machiavellian; it wasn’t a move to make it look as if the Republicans had been manipulated into having to condemn something they would have condemned anyway; it was someone speaking from the heart and believing that all right-minded people felt as he did, and being right. _For once, Sam, my naïve passionate brilliant little friend, being absolutely right_. When his opponent in the congressional race had shaken his hand at a fund-raiser for the victims of the bomb, there had been a warmth to his smile that looked unforced. That pat on the arm Hayden Taylor gave Sam as they stepped off the podium hadn’t been for the cameras, although the cameras had managed to pick it up, and neither was their subsequent conversation. Josh had demanded that Joey Lucas read the man’s lips and she had reluctantly done so, talking about the Democrats supposedly being the party that believed in the right to privacy, and Josh telling her – through Kenny – to shut up now and start translating. She had certainly lost no time in pointing out how mutually exclusive those two orders were, but, according to Joey – and Kenny – the conversation had gone like this:

_That was a fine speech, Sam, and I appreciate what you said about me. I’m also grateful you probably phrased it better than I would have done. It’s just a shame you’re not a Republican._

_No, sir, it really isn’t._

That sweet smile of Sam’s, no wonder Taylor had looked at him more as if he was a favorite – if wayward – nephew than his political opponent.

_Come to dinner on Saturday night. Fiona wants to meet you. Next week we can go back to damning each other’s policies and parties. This weekend, let’s have a time out._

_I’d be honored._

_One more thing, Sam, if my daughter asks – you’re engaged or married. Married would be better but I’ll settle for engaged. On no account can you cross my threshold as single and unattached. I’ve put up with her dating a guitarist and a drug addict, but I draw the line at a Democrat._

Another smile. _Yes, sir._

Josh had positively stomped into Toby’s room to complain that Republicans were getting _this close_ to patting Sam on the head and giving him a cookie while he was ‘sir’-ing them. 

“Isn’t Hayden Taylor older than Leo?” Toby returned, annoying Josh by failing to get as irritated as he’d hoped. He’d often thought that Toby should be more like Old Faithful and just go off at regular and predictable intervals instead of insisting on all this tortuous complexity of character. 

“Yes, but…”

“And isn’t Sam like…twelve…? Thereby making it appropriate for him to show some respect for his elders, which, speaking as one of his elders, is an attitude I personally like to encourage in him. And I don’t care about him being bi-partisan in private. I just don’t think he should give away free sound-bites to the Republican Party.” 

“He’s not ‘twelve’, he’s at least…” Josh did the math and then did it again to double check. “You know, people used to assume we were brothers, and not with that big a gap in between us, or anything. I’m not saying twins, but brothers born to reasonably fertile parents with a regular sex life. He has no right looking that much younger than me.”

“He _is_ younger than you,” Toby pointed out unsympathetically. “He’s years younger than you. He’s years younger than everyone in the building. Which is why we banished him to Orange County to stop annoying us all with his full head of hair and still-perfect teeth.”

Donna appeared in the doorway with a clipboard. “Sam has a portrait in the attic, Josh. You should really get one. It could do wonders for your hairline.”

“You’re fired,” Josh assured her. He turned back to Toby. “So, you don’t think I should call Sam and tell him on no account to enter the home of any Republicans this weekend?”

“Do you have reason to believe that Hayden Taylor is in fact a practicing Satanist who needs the blood of young Democrats to fulfill his pact with Lucifer?”

“No, but…”

“Then leave him alone, Josh. He’s flown the nest. Our little boy’s all grown up now and we have to let him fail or succeed by himself.”

Toby might have spoken with mockery but his eyes had been serious and Josh had known he was right. The trouble was he wasn’t willing to let Sam go yet. Sam was naïve and impetuous and brilliant and innocent, and he needed Josh and Toby to extricate him from the troubles in which his brilliance and innocent and impetuousness and naivety landed him. That was the way it was. Sam had no right to just go off to California and grow up and not need them. It wasn’t fair and it didn’t feel…right.

 

Now, the day after Sam’s speech, Josh was still thinking about it. He still blamed Will Bailey for the fact that Sam was running for Congress in an unwinnable race instead of being here, where he should be, helping Toby write speeches and being there when Josh wanted advice or just to go and have lunch with a friend who could always cheer him up. Will had pulled off a miracle getting a dead guy to win an election; and it would have been nothing other than a triumph for the Democratic party if it hadn’t led to Sam being talked into running; but that bad had evened out the good as far as Josh was concerned. 

Because it was emotional blackmail, that was what it was, the widow of a dead Democrat and a guy who had worked his ass off to pull off a miracle, both of them whammying Sam with the guilt trip because Sam had been sent down there to rain on their parade and had felt bad about it afterwards. But as far as Josh was concerned, Will had bailed on Sam when he had left him to the mercies of Scott Holcomb, who hadn’t done a good job, and was, in any case, an asshole. Josh still blamed Will Bailey for the fact that Sam hadn’t won, and knowing it was unreasonable and unfair, that didn’t alter the fact that he blamed him. He had believed Sam could pull off a miracle in the 47th and so had Toby, and the reason Sam hadn’t, as far as he was concerned, was because Will Bailey had lived up to his name and just plain bailed. Which he’d then done again when he’d left them to go and work for the Vice President. And knowing that Will was a guy of vision and integrity, that didn’t really help that much when he hadn’t used his vision and integrity to help Sam, only to sucker him into running before _bailing_ on him. Nor was he doing much to help them right now as he helped to prop up a lame duck Vice President picked by the Republican party.

What Sam had done by scaring the Republicans with how close he’d come in Orange County, was to make them change their candidate. So, Chuck Webb had been leaned on by his party to retire and they had put up a moderate candidate with liberal leanings instead, Hayden Taylor. Josh really didn’t want that to be Sam’s legacy: Sam Seaborn, the Democrat who got the Republicans to field a better candidate than they’d bothered with before.

Josh had known Sam for around twenty years now, since he was a skinny, shiny-haired kid at Princeton to whom Josh, visiting with a group of Harvard alumni friends, had been loftily patronizing, and then been absolutely creamed by in a debate, along with the rest of his team. Because it had turned out that young Sam Seaborn, Abi Hyams’ younger brother Bobby’s absurdly good-looking little friend, had a mind like a steel trap and could argue – in soul-stirring lyrical prose – any point you threw at him. Josh had retaliated by taking him aside at the after-debate party – where Sam was still telling people five years older than him just exactly how wrong they were – and giving him too much beer, so he would stop countering all their arguments and would revert to being a nineteen year old college kid who threw up and fell over, both of which Sam had obligingly done. Which was when Josh had suffered a pang of conscience and taken him outside to walk it off, where he had learned that even when drunk and incapable of navigating a straight line, Sam could still counter an argument even if he had trouble arranging all the words in the right order. Josh had driven away from that first encounter and said to Abi Hyams in the car: ‘That kid is going to do something amazing as soon as he – you know – hits puberty. He just needs…”

“Mentoring?” Abi had suggested. “Encouraging?”

“Regular bullying by trained professionals so he doesn’t get too full of himself. He needs to have his arguments crushed by incisive debate. I’m going to call him as soon as we get home and point out to him all the ways in which he was wrong.”

“But you agree with him,” Abi pointed out. “You were just playing devil’s advocate.”

“That’s not the point. He needs to be able to counter everything the Republican party throws at him when he’s running for…something.”

“He doesn’t want to go into politics, I asked Bobby. He wants to be a lawyer.”

“You have to be a lawyer to work in politics. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to be in politics.”

“He cares about politics but I think he wants to change the world through contract law or something.”

When Josh just looked at her, Abi had sighed. “Or possibly his father was a lawyer and Sam has always been expected to be a lawyer and he’s had a very expensive education paid for by his father who expects him to make something of himself because there are other people in the world who didn’t have the privileges Sam did and it would be an insult to them as well as to his father if Sam didn’t…”

Josh nodded. “Yeah, he told me something about playing the clarinet and how if you don’t practice you should give it to a kid who’ll use it, which I gather was supposed to have some kind of broader philosophical meaning. Hard to tell in between the ‘kill me – kill me now’s and the barfing. I’m just saying, he’s a smart kid but he doesn’t know everything yet and he needs reasoned opposition to his arguments so he can hone them. Also, he creamed us in that debate and I really need to kick his ass for that.”

“Lucky for him you _do_ know everything and can share with him the benefits of your great intellect and experience.”

“Yes, it really is….” Josh had grinned at her. And then they had stopped off at a motel on the way home and he hadn’t thought about Sam Seaborn, or anything much that wasn’t to do with how Abi looked naked, until he was home again. Then he had dug out the scrawled piece of paper Sam had thrust into his hand at Josh’s insistence – after he had helped him to throw up in the gutter – with Sam’s telephone number. He had done a little research and dictated some really incisive counter arguments onto Sam’s answerphone, telling him he expected to hear back from him before eight o’clock that night or else he was chalking it up as a score for Harvard. Sam had countered right onto Josh’s answerphone an hour later, beautiful prose and unshakeable precedents, and Josh had smiled in the satisfaction of having found a really first class mind to help nurture. Not to mention a pretty likeable human being to tease, bully, and befriend.

And all the many times since when he had thought about how much Sam Seaborn, no longer a skinny little college kid who puked into the gutter after three beers, but a bona fide magna cum laude graduate of Princeton, qualified lawyer, and Deputy Communications Director for the Bartlet administration – albeit one who did still occasionally fall over from time to time – was going to wow the world some day. At no point had he expected the sum total of his achievements to be making the Republicans pick a more liberal candidate for the California 47th. He wasn’t sure he was ever going to forgive Will Bailey for that.

He didn’t even know he wasn’t alone in his office until the President said: “You’ll be talking to Sam this evening?”

Josh started to his feet. “Mister President, I didn’t hear you.”

President Bartlet smiled. “You were thinking about Sam and that speech he gave. God, I love it when he gets the bit between his teeth. The Williams boy pulled through, did you hear? Six hours in surgery but he pulled through. I just spoke to his father. His grandmother’s going to make it as well. We need to get the people who did this. Sam’s right. In a country with our constitution, how can there be anywhere for people like that to hide? How do they even become like that in the first place?”

“I don’t know, sir. I don’t know how they got like that.” _I only know that some music will always sound like sirens to me because some of them did_.

“So, you’ll tell Sam, when you speak to him?”

“Yes, sir. Tell him what…?”

“That he did well with that speech. And I’m glad he’s having dinner with Hayden. He’s a good man even if he does have his head up his ass when it comes to immigration, taxation, health insurance, school prayer, the role of government, and the second amendment.”

“Are you telling him that as well, sir?”

“Just tell him I said he did well. And he needs to come and visit us all soon. Tell him we miss him. Remind him what I told him when I was beating him at chess. Tell him, I believe it now more than ever. He’ll know what I mean. What time do you usually call him?”

Josh felt exposed. “I don’t call him _every_ day.”

“Donna said you did.”

“Donna has a big mouth.” As the President just looked at him, Josh rolled his eyes. “It’s a stressful time for him right now. I’m just touching base.”

Bartlet snorted, not unsympathetically. “You think I wouldn’t call Leo every day if he was running for office in Orange County for the second time after getting totally pounded the first time? Tell him what I said.”

Josh waited until the President was on his way back to the Oval Office before sitting down a little sulkily. “Donna!”

She was there in a moment, looking groomed and long-suffering and unnecessarily pretty. “You summoned me, O Master?”

“Not by rubbing a lamp, so enough with the _I Dream of Jeannie_ stich. Why did you tell the President that I call Sam every day?”

“Because you do. You get home, you call him. You do it every night.”

“Yeah, but…you don’t have to _tell_ everyone.”

Donna gave him one of her annoyingly perky little smiles. “I think it’s sweet.”

“I am not ‘sweet’,” Josh complained as she exited the room with a light-footedness that was just plain annoying. Raising his voice he added: “I’m actually a very important person!”

“If you say so,” Donna called back cheerfully.

Josh slammed a folder shut in annoyance and then picked up the phone to call Sam. It was true he didn’t have any _evidence_ that Hayden Taylor was a practicing Satanist, but did that necessarily mean that he wasn’t?

***  
_Eight days earlier_

Donna told him about the appointment as he walked through the door. A nine o’clock with Steven Wynn. Even the name made his hackles rise. He couldn’t tell if it sounded like an insurance salesman or a football player. He just knew he didn’t like it. 

He went in to see Toby while Donna was still calling after him: “What are you in such a snit about?’ He felt it was probably best for his dignity if he just refused to engage with someone accusing him of being in a ‘snit’.

“Steve Wynn’s here. Well, he’s not here. But he’s going to be here in a couple of hours.”

“And I care about this why?” Toby enquired.

“Because he’s Sam’s campaign manager.”

“And?”

“And I don’t like him.”

“You didn’t like Scott Holcomb.”

“Scott Holcomb was an asshole who screwed up Sam’s campaign.”

Toby saved the document he was working on and sat back. “Agreed.”

“Sam got creamed.”

“Yes, he did. But we always knew that he would. He went there on a suicide mission, remember? It was to pacify an angry house minority who were going to complain that the President hadn’t done enough to make them the majority, and to energize the state party. That was what Sam was there to do. He did raise the profile. He did quell a lot of complaints from House Democrats. He did make Horton Wilde’s widow happy and proud, and he did make it look as if the President gave a damn about the California 47th. As far as all of those aims go – mission accomplished.”

“I told him I wouldn’t let him look like a fool.”

“I don’t think he did,” Toby returned mildly. “He stuck to his principles. He looked – as CJ kept telling us – youthful and energetic. He could have done with a haircut, but on the whole I think he looked as non-foolish as someone can look whose campaign was mishandled from the outset and whose supporters managed to make the headlines for all the wrong reasons from before they even set foot in California.”

Josh grimaced. “I usually just blame Will Bailey. But that’s so I don’t have to remember that I told him I thought it was a good idea. I told Sam he should run.”

“Yes.” Toby nodded. “Although blaming Will Bailey works for me too.”

“Except he backed out and left it to Holcomb because the DNC wanted Holcomb and he wanted to give Sam the best possible chance.”

“Sam would have done better with Will running his campaign.” Toby dropped his pen on the table, making Josh wonder why he was holding a pen while using a laptop anyway; did he make written notes with one hand while typing with the other? “So, however pure his motives may have been, I’m still good with blaming Will.”

“Me too, because then I don’t have to think about how I alienated his campaign manager five minutes off the plane, how we trapped people in Disneyland, the President insulted the French while the cameras were running, I sent Donna to talk to a Communist, Amy set a place-setting on fire, and you got into a bar fight.”

“I usually blame Charlie for the bar fight.”

“Nevertheless…”

Toby sighed and sat up right. “Look, we both know that Sam lost that election the moment he told some of the richest one percent of voters in the country that he was going to be supporting a tax plan that made the richest one percent pay more taxes. We helped him lose – we helped a lot, but Sam basically climbed up on a cross and crucified himself. But I think we’re all agreed that any campaign manager Sam has is going to work out better for him than you and me.”

“No, that’s where you’re wrong. Not Steve Wynn. Who is, frankly, a jock.”

“He’s a graduate of Princeton,” Toby returned. “Do they even have jocks at Princeton? I thought they were a hundred percent nerd?”

“He was a jock and he probably bullied Sam.”

Toby didn’t try to hide his disbelief. “Would that be a chess jock or a calculus jock?” 

CJ walked in as Josh was shifting uncomfortably in his chair. “I’m just saying, I’ve met him and I don’t like him.”

“Who are we not liking now?” she asked of Toby.

“Josh has – you’ll be amazed to hear – taken against Sam’s campaign manager.”

CJ rolled her eyes. “Well, shocker.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Josh demanded indignantly.

CJ patted him on the shoulder. “Let’s just say that if you ever thought any campaign manager was good enough for Sam I would probably fall down dead with surprise.”

“He was a jock. He probably used to flick Sam with wet towels in the locker room.”

Toby frowned. “Why do people do that anyway? I’ve never understood it.”

“Repressed sexual desire,” CJ explained helpfully. “You guys are all basically a seething mass of repressed lust for one another and as you’re too hidebound to act on those desires you flick each other with wet towels or hit each other. It’s almost charming, but…not.”

“Why do women think that all male interaction is based upon the sexual urge?”

“Because it is.”

“No, it isn’t.”

CJ sighed. “Why do you guys think that we women are always on the brink of making out with our female friends?”

Josh shrugged. “For the same reason you think ‘we men’ are with our male friends – hope springing eternal.”

“I am trying to work in here,” Toby pointed out. “I know the open laptop, the stack of reference books, and my being speechwriter to the President may somehow have obscured that fact, but if either or both of you had to urgently be somewhere else right now I could probably live with the disappointment.”

Josh rolled his eyes. “Look, seriously, people. Wynn keeps trying to push Sam towards the center. Sam isn’t comfortable in the center. He’s not John Hoynes. This guy isn’t helping to get Sam’s views to the wider public, he’s trying to stifle Sam’s views and make him a mouthpiece for what he thinks will get him elected.”

CJ nodded. “Yeah, Josh. In case you somehow missed it in the however many years you’ve been in politics now, that’s actually what campaign managers _do_. Last time, Sam got killed in California because he allied himself with a tax plan that was always going to be about as popular in Orange County as bubonic plague, not to mention the fact that every single member of the President’s staff except – let me think, oh yes – me – acted as if they were appearing in A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To Newport Beach from the minute they stepped off the plane.”

Josh and Toby exchanged a glance. Toby grimaced. “We’re actually more comfortable with blaming Will Bailey.”

“Okay, you do that then, but here in the real world can I suggest that you, Josh, try not to alienate Sam’s campaign manager or – you know – piss anyone off for a couple of weeks so that Sam doesn’t get asked about it and doesn’t have to defend you, which we both know he would do even if you had told Mary Marsh that her Proposed Policy of Moral Improvement was best used as a suppository.”

“I wouldn’t actually say that,” Josh muttered, although not with a great deal of conviction.

“I’ll try not to get pelted with fruit and vegetables when we go out to campaign for Sam next week. And perhaps this time the President won’t insult the French – or hairdressers, Donna won’t be photographed having lunch with a Communist, and Toby won’t get into any more brawls.”

“I just want to say that I was happy in my blaming-Will-Bailey place,” Josh pointed out.

“Yeah, tough. Take some responsibility for your part in Sam’s downfall and try not to replicate any of the dumb things you did last time.” CJ straightened up majestically, said with great dignity: “I have no idea why I came in here now” and left.

Toby waited until she was out of earshot before saying: “You know, CJ has a point. You could try not to alienate Steven Wynn.”

“Even though he probably used to flick Sam with wet towels in the locker room?”

“Even then.”

Josh sighed and got to his feet. “Okay, I’ll play nice, but I don’t think I get enough credit for my incredible tact and self-restraint or my diplomatic dexterity in the face of provocation.”

“Maybe because you never show any?”

“Could be.” Josh sloped back to his office, in no better temper than when he had left it, although now bowed down with a lot more inconvenient guilt.

***

_Two days earlier_

Tracy still couldn’t decide which dress to buy. She had worked for nearly a year to get to this point, and here she was, a month before the Junior Prom, trying to tell herself it didn’t matter that much, was kind of silly, some people weren’t even going; the practical side of her warring with the impractical as she gazed and gazed at the strapless burgundy dress that she just knew would go best with the warmth of her cappuccino-colored skin. That was a new dress; it had come out of nowhere – or more likely New York – and thrown out all of her previous calculations. Before that it had been a straight race between the green and the blue; the silk and the taffeta. She acknowledged the blue was more sophisticated; she liked its subtly elegant sheen, whereas the green was more frivolous and frothy and cut a little lower. She had pictured herself in both while all the while saving her allowance, babysitting for various friends of her mother, and working in a store every Saturday while the friends of richer parents were off having fun.

Tracy was smart. That was acknowledged by everyone, even – reluctantly – by her younger brother. She had been born smart while being examined closely for signs of becoming an impractical dreamer like her father, who had also been smart but in a way that had no practical purpose. Her mother was bone-deep practical; a nurse who had raised two children on a wage that was hardly more than the allowance of some of her friends, and who took pride in her children’s brains and commonsense in the way Sharilyn Dempsey’s mother took pride in her daughter’s froth of golden hair. Tracy’s mother had often said that you could never be too smart, not when you had to be twice as smart as a man for another man to acknowledge you were half as smart as he was, and twice as smart again if you happened to be black. Schooling was a gift, her mother said with such ferocious conviction that even Eli had given up complaining about homework in case his mother made good on her threat to demand that the school gave him more. Their father – as their mother never got tired of telling them – had been an impractical man. An idle sort of dreamer who never applied himself to anything, their mother said, usually just before she warned Tracy never to choose a man because of his looks; brains were what mattered, brains and heart and integrity. Also a steady paycheck. And, of course, any choosing of men of any caliber was much better left until one had a college degree. Getting married young was just like giving up a part of who you were, her mother said. Sometimes it was kept for you, and you could get it back when the kids were grown up; sometimes you never did.

Tracy made a lot of fun of her mother to her face. Several times now she had skipped in singing a soppy song and wearing a rapt expression as she told her passionately that she had married Jethro Tulliver, and she was going to move in with him to his parents’ trailer just as soon as she’d raised the bail money to get him off that drug-dealing charge. The first time she’d done it her mother’s shriek of horror had probably reached a note never before registered by the human ear; that was what Tracy had told her anyway. Judith McAllister had sat down and patted her heart dramatically and then told Tracy she would be the death of her and then laughed so hard she had almost choked before calling her sister to tell her about the joke Tracy had just pulled on her. She had appreciated the joke most of all because it was the proof that Tracy had gotten what she was telling her, and why. They weren’t really a family for heart-to-hearts but they had their means of communicating. Not a lot got said, but a lot was understood all the same.

Behind her back Tracy thought her mother talked a lot of sense. It didn’t do to go around telling mothers stuff like that or they’d get even more full of themselves than they already were, but whatever she said to her mother at home, when in the schoolyard, Tracy repeated a lot of her wisdom. She told Deirdre that going steady with a loser like Phil Dugnall was just dumb, and she pointed out to Helen Sachs that babies might look cute in the commercials but the reality was a dead end job and a dead end life, and to use some protection.

Her school reports were something to be proud of. Her mother liked that she got ‘A’s in most subjects, of course she did, but she liked most of all the comments from the teachers about how Tracy stayed cool in a crisis, how Tracy always knew where the fire exits were and the right procedure when the school bus broke down on that sweltering hot day and no one else seemed to know the right thing to do. Tracy didn’t use her cell-phone frivolously. Not because she didn’t want to – she would have loved to spend hours chatting about events they’d all lived through that day in the school with friends in the evening – but because her mother had given it to her for emergencies, and her mother worked hard for her money. So, she carried it always and made sure it was charged up and ready just in case some emergency reached her – she thought of emergencies like something spilled, water or oil, that lapped at the feet and had to be bridged somehow – and she had need of it. And, after Sharilyn Dempsey had had her phone taken along with her purse, she kept it in her bra. It was a small phone and she wore a loose fitting top so it wasn’t obvious, but it did mean that if someone mugged her one day and took her purse, she would still have the means to call the police. The fear of turning into a shiftless dreamer was a constant, so whenever she came up with a strategy like that by herself, she felt a sense of relief that her father’s impractical genes were not yet overwhelming her mother’s side of the family.

But right now she was feeling…pretty much like a sixteen year old girl who wanted a dress she couldn’t afford. The burgundy was the best; no question about it. She could have lost her heart to the blue silk _or_ the green taffeta if she hadn’t seen the burgundy, but now she had, she couldn’t think of anything else. Sadly, she counted her money again. It wasn’t enough, not by seventy-five dollars, and she couldn’t earn that kind of money in time, not at ten bucks a time for babysitting. She couldn’t ask her mother; not because she wouldn’t lend her the money, but because she would. And mixed right in with that breathless, painful _wanting_ of that dress there was a calm, irritatingly practical voice reminding her that a ball-gown that she could use for one night and one night only was a ludicrous waste of her mother’s hard-earned money, especially when there was a chance Eli could go to summer camp, which he would need, being a boy and not having a strong masculine role model, not to mention being fourteen, and so inevitably poised on the brink of doing something stupid round about twenty-four hours a day. 

She and Eli joked about who they were as statistics as well as who they really were. “You don’t have a strong masculine role model and so will inevitably bow to peer pressure to become a dumb hoodlum loser I will have to bail out of jail” came up often, as did the statistics on teenage pregnancies for girls of single parents. Confronting statistics seemed like as good a way as any to sidestep the slippery, unfriendly things. Eli wasn’t as smart as Tracy but he was, as his sister often told him, ‘smart for a boy’. She did actually mean it as a compliment but it always made him sulk. One more year, he told her, and he was going to be so much taller than her. “Yeah, but you’ll still be a boy, so probably pretty dumb” she assured him with sisterly kindness.

Tracy was still thinking about the dress as she walked back home, attempting to make herself love the blue or the green dress as much as she had before she’d seen the burgundy one. She was so occupied with thinking about the dress that she didn’t notice the car crawling along beside her until the skinhead with a swastika on his forehead was pointing a gun in her face and telling her to get in. As she was bundled into the back of the car, she found herself thinking that her mother was right, and that dreamy impractical side she had inherited from her father, was in her, after all, and now seemed likely to have just got her killed.

***

_Eight days earlier_

“Josh.”

“Steven.”

They faced each other for a moment, Josh irritated to discover that Wynn was at least six inches taller than him and had considerably more hair. He looked a lot more like a football player than a chess grand master to him, with those broad shoulders and the square jawed good looks, and the wet towel flicking scenario seemed a lot less like the fabrication of a slightly over-protective friend. It was annoying to discover that, beautifully cut although Josh’s jacket was, Wynn’s seemed to hang with even more style.

“How’s Sam?”

Wynn smirked at him. “Most people ask about the trip to DC.”

“You’re here, aren’t you? I think that’s proof enough your car, plane, and cab didn’t crash.”

“And yet some people think you lack simpatico. He’s well. He’s positive. He’s…”

“Ahead in the polls…?”

Wynn shrugged and took a seat. “He’s doing as well as can be expected at this stage of the campaign.”

“How many points is he lagging behind Taylor?”

Wynn regarded Josh levelly. “A few more than he would be if he listened to his campaign manager.”

“Have you tried flicking him with wet towels?”

Wynn positively smirked. “I’m reserving the wet towels for next week. I need to keep something in reserve in my armory of persuasion.”

Josh narrowed his eyes. “I knew you bullied him at Princeton.”

“I bullied him at middle school too. It was good for him. A guy that smart needs to be reminded that sometimes brains aren’t the solution to everything. Sometimes you need to cough up your lunch money and learn to say ‘uncle’. Are you telling me I _didn’t_ prepare him perfectly for a career in government?”

Josh really hated how perfect Wynn’s teeth were. Thinking over how many concessions they had been forced to make since last month, never mind since President Bartlet had taken office, he had to admit Wynn had a point about the preparation for public office thing, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t really dislike his smile.

“What’s your strategy this week?”

Wynn shrugged gracefully. “Chinese burns mostly. The occasional swirly.”

“I’m serious.”

“And I’m serious about getting him elected. And he’s not going to get elected being the good little follower of President Bartlet’s brand of wealth-taxing, business-bashing, liberal do-gooder politics. Not in Orange County.”

“You’re the same as Scott Holcomb, you want Sam to run away from who he really is, and what he believes.”

“What Sam believes isn’t necessarily what the people of Orange County believe.”

“He wants to be elected on a platform of his own beliefs so he can represent the people of that congressional district. Not trick them into voting for him.”

Wynn rolled his eyes. “Josh, be realistic. If Sam wants to play a part in the political life of this country as an elected official, he has to get elected, and you guys decided the place he was going to try was in the California 47th, that means he’s stuck with having to run in the California 47th if he doesn’t want to look like a carpetbagger. He can’t get elected there as someone who backs a tax plan that punishes the people he’s asking to vote for him. Taylor is promising to protect people’s rights to defend themselves from burglars while Sam wants to campaign on a platform of making sure those burglars don’t get the death penalty even if they kill the guy he’s asking to vote for him and then rape his wife.”

“Well, the abolition of the death penalty would also protect those wealthy tax-paying members of the California 47th from getting killed by lethal injection if they killed their old wife to inherit her trust fund before marrying their secretaries. So, there could be a whole boatload of voters Sam would get right there if you let him run on his own issues instead of yours.”

“How many compromises do you and this office make on a week by week basis, Josh? Tell me, really, I want to know.”

Josh sucked in some air. “A lot.”

“Of course you do. Because that’s the price you pay to be an elected official or to work for an elected official. So, how come President Bartlet’s principles can be whittled down, diluted, altered, and compromised, but Sam has to remain a shining beacon of unelectable purity? If you want him to win this race, he has to shut up about some things he feels strongly about, and talk positively about some things he doesn’t like. That’s what it’s going to take for him to get elected in Orange County and if he doesn’t like it, he should get out of politics and get back into law, and you’re not being any friend to him by telling him it’s still fifth grade and he can act out if he doesn’t get his own way.”

Josh gritted his teeth. “Is he ‘acting out’?”

“No, he’s not, because I’m keeping him away from all the people that might encourage him to do so. We’ve had some disagreements but I have a solid team around me and he’s not prepared to hold out against an entire room filled with people allotted to help him by the DNC. Sam’s not that arrogant.”

“So, you’re bullying him! You’re ganging up on him and bullying him into doing what you say?”

“We’re trying to get him elected, Josh. What are you trying to do? Do you want him in Congress or do you want him back here being Toby Ziegler’s lap dog and your racquetball partner? Sam could have a glittering career in politics. He could do a lot of good. But he has to get _elected_ and to get elected he has to do what I say.”

“Any district, California 47th or not, would be lucky to have Sam as their elected official. He will work tirelessly for those people and I resent you acting as if he’s a bad check you’re trying to pass.”

Wynn still, irritatingly, refused to take offence, steepling his fingers and giving Josh a pitying look. “Hayden Taylor has been married to the same scandal-free woman for forty-one years. He has four kids and six grandchildren. Sam is unmarried at thirty-six. At least some of his potential constituents are going to take that as proof he’s either gay or sleeping around or both. Ideally he should have been married for ten years by this point and have at least a couple of kids. Instead, the only woman his prospective constituents know he’s slept with is a call girl, which, at the very least proves that he indulges in casual sex, which in the post-AIDS era is never a good selling point.”

“It was one time!” Josh protested. “He let a woman pick him up in a bar one time after he’d had a very bad day and when he was worried about a friend.”

“But no one believes that you do it once and you get caught. Everyone believes you do it twenty – thirty – a hundred – five hundred times and out of all those times you get caught once.”

“So, because Sam slept with Laurie _once_ , he’s a slut?”

“Yes.” Wynn was unblinking. “An unmarried slut who may also be gay. And that’s _before_ I get onto the many, many ways in which Sam’s political convictions differ from those of the people he is asking to elect him. We both know Sam’s a great guy but as a political candidate in Orange County he’s a hard sell. I’m here to ask you not to make it harder.”

Josh just knew that if he gritted his teeth any harder he was going to damage the crowns but he just couldn’t seem to help himself. “And how would we do that?”

“Don’t come to Orange County. The President can give Sam his endorsement without making a personal visit.”

“It will look as if the President is endorsing him less than he did last time.”

Wynn nodded. “Exactly. And that’s a good impression to be given for Sam right now. He’s got the Presidential endorsement which means Democrats will vote for him but the fact that the President obviously has some reservations, that’s going to help him with floating voters. He’s young and energetic and personable. Women like him. We can get a lot of the housewives and the eighteen to twenty five demographic, as long as he’s not saying anything that is going to alienate them policy-wise. If they can’t stand President Bartlet, the fact Sam used to work in the White House is going to be offset by the fact that he and the President aren’t as tight as they used to be.”

Josh snatched a breath. “That isn’t what Sam wants.”

“How much do you think it helped him last time when you guys rolled into town? Talk about ‘Send in the Clowns’. We don’t need the circus, Josh. We need the endorsement, not the shots of kids trapped in the Pirates of the Caribbean or your assistant having lunch with a Communist. If you really want to help Sam – stay away from California, and keep the President away, too, that’s all I came here to say.” 

Wynn rose to his feet, nodded politely to Josh and then was gone, leaving him seething and frustrated and horribly afraid that the man was right. Sam wasn’t going to get elected without compromises. That was a fact of political life. Josh knew that better than anyone. He spent most days making trades to get bills through; agreeing to attach amendments that diluted or altered the laws they were trying to pass. All these years in power and they hadn’t managed to get gays accepted into the military or gay marriages accepted or the price of gas raised or the seas protected from the next spill of oil or Big Tobacco brought to account or public schools turned into models of learning or any of a hundred other things that really mattered to all of them. That was what it meant to be in politics. You cared passionately, you worked tirelessly, and you compromised, every damned step of the way. Except he didn’t want that for Sam. And Wynn was right, and that was what it would take, but maybe he didn’t want Sam to have to do that; to have to compromise who he was and what he believed in, the way the rest of them had to do every day. Maybe he really needed Sam to be the one guy who stubbornly persisted in never giving an inch, but rather in trusting to the greater good, the wider truth, the higher ideal. Maybe they all needed Sam to keep their ideals for them so they knew someone was ensuring they stayed whole and intact in some form or other, however many compromises the rest of them had to make every day.

“So…?” Toby shrugged as if he didn’t care. “Is Wynn a step up from Holcomb or not?”

Josh didn’t meet his eye as he rearranged pencils on his desk. “If anyone can get Sam elected it’s probably him.”

“I’m sensing a ‘but’…?”

“No ‘but’.” Josh arranged the last pencil so it was absolutely straight and absolutely parallel to the one next to it; not meeting Toby’s eye as he said: “I just wonder if this is really what Sam wants. If this is really what’s best for him.”

“Isn’t it a little late to wonder that now?” Toby returned, so quietly that Josh just knew he had been thinking the same thing.

“I keep thinking we got him into this.”

“We actually didn’t. He actually made that initial stupid promise to Will Bailey and the widow of that dead guy with no input of any kind from us.”

“But we didn’t talk him out of it.”

Toby considered the point for a moment and then shrugged again. “I acted out about him taking the Lakers banner. My conscience is clear.”

Josh waited until Toby was out of the room and entirely out of earshot before he said so quietly that even he could hardly hear the treacherous words: “I’m just not sure that I even want him to win…”

***

_Five days earlier_

Watching the videotape, Toby Ziegler wondered if this was going to be the last sight he ever had of Sam Seaborn; and if so, was this going to be his last memory of Sam Seaborn; the one that overwhelmed and overwrote all others. Was he never again going to remember Sam smiling or writing or even jet-propelled on a wave of righteous indignation, without his memory hitting this image, like a speedboat ripping out its propeller on a sandbank: a grainy black and white image from a gas station security camera?

He and Josh had watched it over and over, trying to see something that would help, some miraculous clue that had been missed by the FBI, but the fact remained there was nothing. There was just Sam walking along the street and that car pulling up onto the sidewalk in front of him, then Sam just standing there, looking bewildered, and then bending down to see if the driver needed help or directions or…or God knows what Sam had been thinking right then, but he had gone _towards_ the car, not away from it. That was the moment when Josh leaned forward and Toby knew – because he was doing it too – that Josh was mentally screaming at Sam to run, run as fast as he could across the street to the gas station. But Sam never did. However many times they watched it, Sam just stood there, mouth slightly open, looking concerned and confused. And then it was the part that CJ and Donna had only watched once before leaving in tears – the men in hooded sweatshirts brandishing a gun at Sam as they opened the trunk and threw its contents clumsily onto the back seat. Sam backing up with his hands raised, probably telling them there was some mistake – the picture was so grainy no one could tell – and one of them grabbing him by the hair and shoving him towards the trunk, the gun held to the back of his head. Toby always held his breath then, in that instant, where the gun was jammed into Sam’s hair to presumably dig in against his skull, because in this version the finger might tighten a fraction further and that might be the end, right there.

There were the little details that Mike Casper had mentioned when he first gave them a copy of the tape; Josh and Toby insisting on it, saying they needed to see it, they knew Sam better than anyone else, they might be able to spot something the FBI hadn’t… But knowledge of Sam wasn’t useful here. Sam was just the guy these sons of bitches had decided to kidnap. They could see there were four guys, who seemed to be young, late teens, early twenties, all wearing hooded sweatshirts; two of them with bottles in their hands, two of them with guns. Not that the bottles seemed to be weapons, there was the definite glint of liquid, beer bottles, half full of beer. The FBI didn’t think it had been planned. They suspected the kidnappers had just been driving around, brains half filled with notions of vengeance for that speech Sam had given, and on seeing him, had decided to abduct him; a drunken impulse, Mike Casper had said, face extra grim because he knew Sam and had known Josh for years, and this was hitting all of them where they lived. Toby had shuddered inside at the thought of Sam at the mercy of four swastika-tattooed hoodlums giving way to their drunken impulses.

Josh persisted in believing it was planned, reasoned, that a ransom would be sent, some demands made. Toby suspected he wasn’t ready to accept that his friend might be lost forever because some moronic thugs had one too many beers and decided to strike one back for the good ol’ boys by shooting a political candidate in the back of the head.

The attack on Charlie had been planned, Josh pointed out. Motivated and reasoned, however adjacent to ethics or decency, minds had been at work behind that intended assassination, that was what Toby suspected Josh meant. Which would mean they would want to keep Sam alive so they could negotiate, using him as a lever. Not just a drunken impulse which would mean they would most probably just beat him to death or blow out his brains then dump his body in a ditch somewhere; a stupid crime by stupid people that would mean Sam’s brilliant mind and sweet nature had made no difference in the end, he would just be another corpse rotting somewhere as it waited for someone to find it.

That was when Toby would get up and switch off the tape while Josh blinked at him owlishly. “There may be something…”

“There’s _nothing_.” Toby collected himself but turned away. “And I don’t want to keep seeing Sam like that. I don’t want to remember him looking so…small.” Because that was what always struck him when those vicious redneck bastards were looming over him, that Sam had to look up at them because they were all taller than he was; looking like some kid being picked on by playground bullies. He didn’t know if he wished Sam had looked scared or not; it would have been painful to see Sam Seaborn looking scared but perhaps slightly less painful than seeing him not showing sense enough to be scared.

_Sam, armed men forced you into the trunk of their car at gunpoint, how much more of a tip-off did you need that these were not nice people?_

Toby snatched a breath. “I keep imagining him trying to reason with them. Wanting to…engage them in rational debate about the roots of their racism.”

Josh ran a hand through his hair. “Well, maybe that would…”

“It won’t do any good, Josh. They’re not going to listen to him. They’re just going to get angry and beat him to death with a tire iron.” He exhaled, closing his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“They must have taken him for a reason.” Josh was doggedly persistent on that point. “An exchange for one of their people who’s in prison. Something like that.”

 _Or they took him because he was there_. Toby didn’t bother saying it again. Mike Casper had said it, Leo had said it, Toby had said it. Josh, CJ and Donna didn’t want to hear it; although he suspected CJ and Donna accepted it even if they didn’t want it said out loud. But Josh was in denial. He didn’t want it to be random and impulsive and pointless. He wanted it to be the act of reasonable madmen who were fuelled by twisted hatred yet still oddly practical when it came to Sam. It would make sense to look after him if they needed him to exchange for their own people, Donna had said that, and Josh was clinging to it like an asthmatic with an inhaler. Toby suspected Donna didn’t actually believe it, but it was what Josh needed to hear, so she had said it, with conviction. If they were trying to win public opinion over to their cause, hurting Sam wouldn’t avail them anything – that had been CJ. He suspected she had said it to make Donna feel better because her eyes had been full of pain even as she was saying the words.

“They blew up a church with seventy-eight people in it, half of whom were over fifty, and fifteen of which were under ten,” Toby pointed out grimly. “I don’t think PR is high on their list of priorities.”

Later he had got Donna alone after she had said something reassuring to Josh and said: “You don’t have to do that.”

He’d thought she would pretend she didn’t know what he was talking about, but she only hesitated a moment in moving a file before placing it carefully on the right pile. “It helps.”

“Yes, but this isn’t just something that’s happening to Josh. It’s happening to all of us. It’s happening to you, too, and…”

“It helps.” She looked up at him, eyes ringed with shadows from lack of sleep. “It helps me. The things I say to make Josh feel better make me feel better too.”

Toby sighed. “Whatever gets you through the day, Donna.” As he had turned away he had wondered what Sam was using to get through the day, if there were even any days left for him to get through any more or if, with each passing hour while they waited by the phone, all that was happening was that the corpse of their friend was getting colder and colder.

Josh came to find him just after, updating him on the FBI intel about a place they’d searched with no luck. Insisting it was a positive move all the same because they had names and addresses of meeting houses and perhaps Sam was being held in one of those. Toby had nodded as if he was convinced, while all the while thinking that people always associated a man’s death with a man’s life; as if his life was somehow cosmic foreshadowing for a suitable end, but it didn’t work like that. The briefest perusal of the crime statistics proved it didn’t work like that. Untimely death had nothing to do with who you were as a person, and everything to do with who the person was who killed you. You never even glimpsed the problems of the drunk driver that pushed you off the freeway to fiery oblivion, you were just dead. If Sam ended up dead in a ditch it wouldn’t be anything to do with who he was; it would just be to do with who had captured him, and the people who had captured him were racists thugs; that was the reality; and who Sam was didn’t make a damned bit of difference.

Toby almost said it out loud and then sighed because it might make a difference who Sam was. It might mean that he would never shut up even if they told him they would kill him if he didn’t; he would still keep trying to show them the error of their ways; oh yes, and the other thing about Sam, was that inside the sweetness and goodness, and the unshakeable belief in the goodness of others, was a steely core that was absolutely unmovable. So he would not cooperate with racist thugs; he would not pretend to agree with them or pretend that they had somehow won him over with their moronic rhetoric; he would keep telling them they were wrong and why they were wrong and what had probably set them on the original path of wrongness, and he would do that until they beat him into unconsciousness or shot him in the head.

None of them were actually talking about what it was probably like for Sam right now. The chances were that he was already dead, but they certainly weren’t admitting that. And they were all maintaining a tacit agreement that they weren’t going to talk about the way he was almost certainly being treated either. The difference was that Toby suspected there were things he had thought of that Josh hadn’t; making the inside of his head a scarier place to be. Josh had done the sane and sensible thing of concentrating on all of Sam’s positive traits and projecting them into his captivity; seeing Sam as dynamic and optimistic and impossible to dislike, like a protective bubble around both the Sam in his head, and the part of Josh that would presumably explode with anger or fear if he let in too much reality to his calculations.

Toby hadn’t mentioned one of his fears; even though he would have really liked the reassurance he was wrong; because he didn’t want to gift anyone with that idea if they hadn’t already had it. He had vivid memories of how he had felt before and after he had been told about the President’s MS. Equally vivid memories of that last day Sam had been able to enjoy before he was being told. He’d felt so guilty, not because he was keeping the truth from Sam, but because he hadn’t found a way to protect him from it permanently. He had wanted his own optimism back instead of this sick feeling of anger and betrayal, and he had wanted Sam to be able to go on in blissful ignorance. Right now, it didn’t seem to have occurred to Josh that these people might sexually as well as physically abuse his friend, and Toby couldn’t be the person to give him that thought, not when he knew how sick it was making him feel. It would have helped to talk about it, to be told by Mike Casper why that wasn’t in their psychological profile. But there was no one to talk to because there was no one as yet showing unmistakable signs of having already considered that possibility. Perhaps Leo had and would be relieved to discuss it with someone else, but what if he just looked at Toby with a new horror in his eyes that Toby had put there?

So, he was keeping that particular nightmare to himself right now, festering away, along with all the other horror movie scenarios of what those four thugs could be doing to his friend right now. He had never been so ungrateful that he had been cursed with a good imagination. If there had been a way to have an imaginationectomy he would have been signing up for the procedure at once.

“They could just want to get the attention of the media…”

Josh again. Toby snatched a breath; fought the nauseated sensation back down; tried to pretend that was even a remote possibility that Josh might be right.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, they could. Of course they could….”

***

_Three days earlier_

Danny was waiting for her after the press conference. She had known he would be. CJ couldn’t decide if it was better or worse that he was there; perfectly conflicted between being grateful for an individual’s sympathy and the fear that if someone was nice to her she was just going to shatter into a million pieces. She imagined herself as fractured crystal in sunlight, her individual fragments forming prisms, people crunching over her in tan leather shoes. Then, as always, she thought of Sam with his eyes open, unseeing, no pulse, no breath, no life. She had never thought there would come a time when she would have been grateful to know that Sam was tied to a chair somewhere, face lumpy and bruised from someone else’s twisted anger, but still alive, still breathing, still someone they could save and who would, in time, be healed.

“Do you know more than you’re saying?”

Danny fell into step with her as if they had been doing this since childhood. Sometimes she thought they had been. Sometimes she thought a boy just like this had pulled her pigtails in junior high while she told him he would always be shorter than her.

“No.”

Danny glanced at her face, reading too much, she knew. She was starting to long for the company of strangers, people who wouldn’t know how close she was to cracking; but unfortunately the thought of being in the company of people who weren’t obsessed with what was happening to Sam was too repugnant to her. She would have ended up hating them for not being consumed with his abduction. If they changed the TV channel in front of her because they wanted to watch sports, she might have to kill them.

“Because I was hoping you might know more than you were saying.” Danny rested his hand on her arm as they reached her office. “CJ, you know I would never say anything that would endanger Sam. I’m not asking as a reporter, I just want to know….”

She closed the door behind them both and lowered her voice to say: “We don’t know anything. We have the tape with four unidentified male Caucasians aged between eighteen and twenty-five, we have a blurry black and white image of the car, a brown late model sedan, no license-plates. We have the direction they drove off in. We have a probable link between them and the Orange County White Pride group that blew up the Calvary Baptist Church. We have a good guess they are vicious racist thugs. Apart from that we’re nowhere.”

Danny searched her face and she could see him positively hoping for signs of concealment, but then he sighed and sat down. “I’m sorry, CJ.” 

“I know.” She could feel that lump in her throat getting bigger. “I keep…seeing him, how I think he probably is right now, either dead or being… and then I remember little moments, him smiling and me…bawling him out or teasing him or… Did I ever tell you he was the one that saved my life at Rosslyn? He pushed me out of the way of the bullets. He didn’t tell me. He was afraid I might feel an obligation.”

Danny reached across and took her hand. “You’re doing really well out there. No one would know you’re one wrong word away from imploding.”

“Thank you.” She nodded, not sure what she was agreeing with, but grateful all the same. 

“How’s everyone else doing? Off the record. You know I meant off the record, right?”

“I know.” CJ nodded again. “The President and Leo look like they lost a son and if Sam turns up dead I can’t answer for what…” She collected herself, off the record or not, she couldn’t tell a reporter that she didn’t trust the President not to unleash all manner of hell upon every white separatist movement in America if Sam Seaborn was found dead. “Josh is… I think he’s in denial about what these people are, which is ironic, as he’s the one with the surgery scar from where they shot him just for being near Charlie. You’d think he would know better than anyone just how little they care about the value of a human life.”

“Josh thinks they took Sam to negotiate?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a possibility.”

“Everything’s a possibility, Danny, but I don’t think we should kid ourselves that these people are going to be Mensa candidates any time soon. They were so stupid they abducted him right in front of a security camera. They had to clear things out of the trunk onto the back seat to make room for him, that’s how prepared they were. It was an impulse. A spiteful impulse, and when they realize how dumb it was, I think they’ll probably kill him.”

“What does Toby think?”

“What Toby always thinks, the worst. Only he isn’t saying it because he doesn’t want to upset the rest of us. He just sits in his office, pretending he’s busy, while all these terrible possibilities eat away at him like cancer.”

Danny tightened his grip on her hand. “Sam’s a very resilient guy. And people like him. Look at Hayden Taylor.”

“Hayden Taylor is a sane and reasonable grandfather who just happens to be a Republican. He’s not a white supremacist thug with a gun.”

“I’m just saying, politically, he and Sam are poles apart but he’s been making all those televised appeals to the community to look out for anything suspicious as if Sam was a member of his campaign team instead of his opponent. He has his whole team out there handing out leaflets with Sam’s picture on them, and it isn’t a publicity stunt, you’ve only got to look at him to see the guy hasn’t slept.”

CJ took a deep breath. “Danny, I know you’re trying to help, and I agree with you that Sam is as lovable as they come. But these are not reasonable people, and the other thing about Sam – he’s stubborn. He is not going to try to find some common ground with these people. He is not going to cooperate with them. He is going to argue with them and annoy them and they are going to beat…” She broke off. Wrapping her arms around her knees, she whispered: “I keep trying to negotiate with God on this. _I know they won’t be giving him steak pie and blankets but could you just stop them maiming him or killing him….”_

“They may just turn him loose. Like you said, this wasn’t a planned abduction. It was an impulse and they have the secret service and the FBI crawling all over Orange County looking for them. If it was me I think I’d blindfold him, drive him to the middle of a cornfield, and dump him.”

CJ drew a shuddery breath, wondering how long you could actually go breathing around that painful constriction of unshed tears. “These are people who care so little about human life that they blew up a church full of senior citizens and children. If they decide Sam’s no use to them – they’ll kill him.”

Danny squeezed her hand. “You’ve got to keep hoping, CJ. Sometimes miracles happen.”

Mentally she was adding _And sometimes they just don’t_ but she was grateful for his words all the same, and even managed to find him a smile and a nod as he left, before breaking down in another violent shower of tears.

***

_Three days earlier_

Sam was not sure which was the more astonishing, the way the sunlight filtering through that high unreachable little window was so gloriously golden; a shower of dust motes, which, in the stream of drenching light, swirled and glittered hypnotically; or that it should surprise him so much. Why, after all, should the light that found its way into this dank place be more anemic than any other part of California? Yet, he had expected something mean and thin and instead there was this extravagance of light. 

The window was at a right angle from where he was sitting – perched uncomfortably on the edge of a rusting plow to try to keep himself out of the sludgy water from the broken pipe flooding the cellar. He could not warm himself in the sunlight, unless he dragged the plow over there, only look at it and wonder if he would ever stand in a beam of light again, yet still it made him feel better. Unfortunately, as the day darkened and turned first bloody, and then gray and granular with twilight, he always felt his hope ebbing with the sinking sun.

Sitting in six inches of filthy freezing water, trying to stop his teeth chattering while blood dripped onto his shirt, Sam had to concede that if Toby had overheard his most recent conversation with his kidnappers, he would probably have been somewhat irritated. No, ‘somewhat irritated’ would probably not have cut it. There was a very good chance there would have been yelling. The words ‘Are you in some way mentally incapacitated?’ might have been voiced at some volume. But what Sam felt Toby wouldn’t be taking into account was that it was, in fact, very, very annoying to be kidnapped, especially by people who were, unquestionably, very, very stupid.

He also found that being annoyed was preferable to being scared. Being scared was, in any case, a waste of time. He wasn’t going to make any impression on anyone through being scared, whereas if he at least voiced his opinion then perhaps there was a chance he might get through to them. Okay, it wasn’t exactly, a _good_ chance, more like the odds of him winning the lottery without buying a ticket first. These people, had, after all, presumably been exposed to the ideas of Doctor King at some point in their lives, might even have heard – if not necessarily be able to spell – the name ‘Gandhi’, and they were still laboring under the comfortable delusion that they were in some way superior to half the population of the globe just by virtue of the color of their zit-covered skin. 

And – he would also have pointed out to Toby, and, okay, it wouldn’t just be Toby, there would also be some yelling coming from Josh and CJ – that he had indeed had every intention of not antagonizing these people. And he had swallowed several – in fact _dozens_ – of rejoinders to some of their most cretinous comments in between the few that had slipped out. He was not, in fact, as Toby would no doubt be suggesting by this point, trying to get his head blown off. But, honestly, what was a man supposed to do when an unwashed teenager asserted that the Bible had been written in English and that proved that Americans were the only true Christians?

That conversation had taken place upstairs in the cluttered living room where the walls were disfigured by posters celebrating White Pride and its various xenophobic offshoots and the one bookshelf was entirely filled with various books ranting against miscegenation, and a lone Tom Clancy thriller. Sam had wondered in passing what Tom Clancy had done to deserve their presumed approval, and had spent a moment being grateful he had never written any thrillers that morons could buy and put on their slightly crooked shelves; implicating him with their views by association. Sam had been full of good intentions about being conciliatory and non-committal and not actually telling them they were driveling idiots, but that comment about the Bible from a zit-faced youth slouched in a leaking couch with a bottle of beer in his mouth had unleashed a floodgate he could not have stopped unless physically gagged. 

“For a start the earliest books of the Bible were actually written in ancient Hebrew by Jewish scribes, except for the Apocrypha, which were written in Greek, as was the New Testament. The New Testament wasn’t translated into Latin until the fourth century AD. By 500 AD it had been translated into over five hundred languages, but a century later it was restricted by the Catholic Church of Rome to Latin so that the power of the Bible remained with the church and could not be accessed by those who did not read or speak Latin. It was not translated into Anglo-Saxon until AD 950 and if we’re talking about printed copies, the Gutenberg Bible – incidentally the first book to ever be printed – was not produced until AD 1455, oh yes, and it was in Latin, too. So, shall we go over together in just how many ways your assertions are a) factually inaccurate and b) incredibly stupid?”

At which point, the people punching him had somewhat disrupted the flow of his history of the Bible, as had being dragged back to this freezing cellar and dumped in the coldest corner with a chain around his ankle. And, okay, he conceded that it was probably not a good idea to call even very stupid people ‘incredibly stupid’ to their faces when they had the power of life and death over you….

Mentally, he imagined Toby gazing at the ceiling at that point. “Oh you admit that, do you? You concede the possibility that insulting the intellect of people with semi-automatic weapons when you have your hands tied and no possible means of escape might not be the best idea you’ve ever had?”

And yes, he did admit that. He did concede that some of his responses to some of their comments, orders, and assertions, had not perhaps been guided by as strong a sense of self-preservation as others might have wished.

“And did it perhaps occur to you to…say just _shut the fuck up_?”

He could imagine being a little scared at that point, looking around for some support from Josh and CJ, some reassurance that if Toby really did look as if he was going to throw him through a plate glass window that they would intervene, and probably not getting that reassurance from their glowering faces; probably more of a silent promise that they would be helping Toby to hurl him the furthest possible distance.

He would, however, expect some support from the President, who would, he was certain, be pleased to know that he had remembered the lecture the man had given him on the history of the Bible, even if he hadn’t managed to work in the history of the Apocrypha and how it had been considered part of the Bible proper until as late as the nineteenth century. He could imagine the President asking him if he had managed to reference any of those interesting facts President Bartlet had shared with him about the Scottish island of Iona. Although, the President had been known to look a little grim in the past, and was probably not feeling too happy with any member of his administration – or even a past member of his administration – who got himself kidnapped after what had happened to Zoey. That was likely to be something of a hot button for this President. And Charlie never liked the President being bothered. Mrs. Bartlet, of course, would be very angry about anything that was likely to cause so much stress to the President, especially if she felt it was avoidable. He wasn’t too sure about Leo. There was a chance the man might intercede to prevent the hurling through a plate glass window party, or a possibility that he might lend a hand. He liked to think that Donna, Carol, and Margaret would intervene to prevent any real bloodshed, but he could not be entirely sure. If the people they worked for had been particularly stressed and difficult due to Sam getting himself kidnapped, they might actually be even tetchier than Toby.

There had always been a tendency on the part of Toby, Josh, and CJ to treat him like their naïve younger brother; the person who had to be protected and patronized and patted on the head. On more than one occasion he had been forced to remind them quite sharply that he was actually as much of an adult as they were, and entitled to be heard, even if he did occasionally fall off sailing boats or display a ‘credulous simplicity’ that imperiled himself or the administration. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t made their own mistakes. Okay, so he’d accidentally slept with a call girl and then got himself photographed hugging her, not to mention handed a damaging videotape to the opposition that had then run on every news channel in the world, but at least he’d never saddled the President with a secret plan to fight inflation, or told the world’s press that the President was relieved he might have to put American lives at risk and kill Haitian civilians, or assumed that just because he had once had sex with a woman she wouldn’t screw him later. 

It occurred to him that the only person he could absolutely rely upon to _not_ advocate throwing him through a window would be Mrs Landingham, who was, unfortunately, dead. But she would not only have put her foot down over the window business, she would have given him a cookie. Which he would have liked because he was actually very hungry.

Sam looked around at his surroundings again. If he were MacGyver he could presumably run up some kind of oxy-acetylene torch to burn through his chain with the soggy debris in the cellar, but being only an ex-Deputy Communications Officer and candidate for Congress, he had no idea how one would do that with a broken crate and some rotten sacks. 

He had tried to listen to what was going on upstairs, and, owing to the extremely shoddy construction of the farmhouse, he had heard enough to make him believe that his kidnappers were a few fathoms out of their depth. A call to what he presumed to be their chapter leaders had sounded unsatisfactory; evidently they had not received the praise they had hoped for. As they had sobered up after the night of their triumphant kidnap of Sam, and the morning light had begun to filter through the small window set so high up in the cellar that he could not have reached it even if his ankle hadn’t been chained to what seemed to be the half-submerged skeleton of a plow, they had looked at him in the manner that married men presumably looked at women the morning after; the ones who looked a great deal less appetizing without the haze of alcohol to encourage their infidelity. He suspected that if there had been a way to give him the white supremacist kidnappers’ equivalent of cab fare home without looking stupid then they would have gone for it. But they were more interested in trying to save face than anything else and they were still rather impressed with themselves for successfully managing a kidnap. He could hear them up there at night, drinking themselves even stupider, while buoying one another up by insisting that they had really done it now, that kidnapping Sam had been some significant rite of passage that now made them more admirable men than they had been the day before.

One of the things Sam would have liked to say to the imaginary Toby who kept heckling his strategizing was that he had not actually pointed out to his kidnappers that frankly kidnapping someone was no great accomplishment when it was unplanned, spur of the moment, disorganized, and only worked because they had got lucky. That was just one of the many things he had not said, even when grossly provoked.

Stung by presumably being told that they didn’t have clearance or the blessing of the chapter leader, or whoever it was they were calling, they had tried to retroactively convince themselves – and Sam – that they did actually have a plan of some kind. Unfortunately, beating him up to make themselves feel slightly less stupid, had always been part of that agenda, although they had delayed for a few hours while they thought up a reason for beating him up other than that they were now wishing they hadn’t kidnapped him after all. They had come up with the idea of the speech they wanted him to read into a videotape after a few hours of heavy drinking, which, as he mentioned to them, completely ruined his image of them as the well-trained soldiers of the apocalypse he had, of course, believed them to be. That had got him smacked around more than somewhat, and his refusal to spout several paragraphs of racist crap, which, as well as being ideologically unsound and xenophobic in the extreme was also totally ungrammatical, had earned him the beating they had been going to dole out sooner or later whatever he said or did.

They had dumped him back in the cellar, once more with the chain around his ankle, the rust on its links almost a perfect color match with the blood on his shirt from his split lip, cracked his head against the wall for punctuation, kicked him in the ribs and guts until he doubled up, too breathless to continue the conversation, and then left him there, the filthy water swirling around his knees. They had seemed to have some vague idea about interrogation techniques and had left the light on, which would probably have been effective in aiding his sleep deprivation if he had not already been so cold, wet and aching that sleeping wasn’t a possibility, and if the bulb had not blown on the second night anyway.

He had heard them debating what to do with him a few times and they had made a few more attempts to get him to record the message into the videotape. That was when they tended to spout the most of their hate-filled crap at him and when he had proven so unequal to biting his tongue. As far as he could tell although they would have liked the triumph of getting an unpatriotic, Arab-loving, wishy-washy liberal do-gooder like himself to record their message, it was as much an excuse to have a point of conflict so they could smack him around. And – as he was certainly going to point out to Toby – as they were going to hit him anyway, he might as well get some of his opinion voiced at the same time.

He had definitely got the impression that their group was very much bush-league in the greater scheme of white supremacist nutbars. Sam was supposed to be their entrée to the majors and they were still trying to find a way to prove that kidnapping him had actually been a daring and brilliant strategy rather than the half-witted drunken impulse it had been dismissed as. Damn, he was so tired he was ending sentences in his head with a preposition.

It was difficult not to think about how much he wanted to hear Toby complaining about that or the scarcity of verbs in Sam’s imagery or to start critiquing his punctuation. But that wouldn’t achieve anything. He had to think up ways to get free. He had tried kicking at the links of the chain and twisting it around the plow to try and break it, but either it was a lot harder than it looked in the movies or he wasn’t doing it right, because the chain remained resolutely unbroken and all he’d done was open up spectacular ridged welts across his palms.

There were rapidly getting to be almost no parts of his body left that didn’t hurt. He had been punched pretty much everywhere which made moving difficult and painful, and he really didn’t like the way his lungs were starting to sound. It was spring out there, sap rising, birds singing – through that broken window he could even hear the birds singing – and yet in here it was damp walls and a flooded basement and the only drinkable water from a broken gutter that he could see through a hole in the stonework and which leaked onto the walls and then dripped down them. That water tasted of moss and leaves but it was a lot less likely to kill him than the brown stuff swirling around his ankles. The griping hunger pain in his guts was indistinguishable from the bruised pain of being punched in the midriff for giving his captors too much ‘backchat’, and everything was starting to pale into insignificance when compared with the pain in his chest and back from what he feared were his infected lungs.

He was starting to believe that they weren’t going to shoot him, after all. They were going to just shut the cellar door on him and leave him down here to starve to death. That way there would be no bullet to trace back to a gun registered to them. He had heard them talking about setting the place on fire and then debating whether that would just draw attention to his corpse being found, better to just leave him there to conveniently die off with it not being anything to do with them. Except for them having kidnapped him and left him chained up, of course, but they seemed to feel that just failing to keep him alive would make them less likely to get the death penalty than putting a bullet in his head.

His kidnappers were apparently unhappy that they had been considered too small beer to be involved in the planning of the church bombing and wanted to prove themselves to their chapter leaders. Instead of being their fast track to promotion to the inner circle, he was proving something of a liability. Too much publicity, too many people looking for him, and no way to take him further out of the area with the roadblocks and searches still going on. Only if he was persuaded to make the tape did there appear to be any kind of design behind their snatching him, which was why, three times a day, two or three of them stormed down here, climbed down the ladder and manhandled him up to the house to shove him in front of the tripod once again and hand him that speech he absolutely refused to read.

He liked to think of himself as an optimist, he really did, but it seemed to Sam that as the days and nights went by and he got colder and hungrier and less and less able to inhale without feeling as if he’d been stabbed in the back, and the people who had kidnapped him became drunker and nastier and more and more embarrassed by how stupid they’d been, that his chances of being rescued were receding faster than Toby Ziegler’s hair.

***  
_Two days earlier_

Tracy had spent the car ride with something over her head that meant the journey was reduced to the smell of her abductors’ sweat, the stink of gasoline from a sputtering exhaust, the texture of coarse cloth against her face, and the sound of hate and bird song. She tried to drown out everything except the possible strategies in her head while being so frightened it was taking a tremendous act of will to stop her teeth from chattering. But she had talked about this with her girlfriends. Mary Paton’s second cousin, Marie, had been grabbed by some drunks one night and had managed to talk them down from doing what they had definitely been planning to do to her by talking about her family and trying to engage with them and elicit their sympathy. Tracy had always thought she would be quite good at that too. She usually got on with people. She could talk to people a lot older than her and hold a conversation without it seeming as if she was bored even if she really was. She had to deal with a lot of anxious parents when she was baby-sitting, not to mention managing difficult little kids who didn’t want to go to bed when they were told to. But she hadn’t ever thought of being grabbed by people who hated her just because of the color of her skin. Every conversational opening she thought of seemed to be mined with problems. You were supposed to make them see that you were a person just like they were, but these people didn’t see her as someone like them, just someone like her. She couldn’t see any way to start a conversation which didn’t lead to them calling her a ‘dirty bitch’ or a ‘whore’ as they had already done, which was going to upset her – which would make her seem weak – or make her angry – which would lead to conflict. Keeping quiet seemed the best idea, so that was what she did, all the way along good roads and then somewhere rutted and open, with birds singing and the distant drone of someone working a tractor. She was afraid of the car stopping because she knew when it did much worse things were going to happen to her than her sitting in the back of a car trying not to gag on the stink of gasoline and hate.

They’d put the bag over her head before she’d gotten more than a glimpse of them, but she had seen that there were three or four of them and they were driving an old car which was brown and which her brother would have been able to identify but which she really couldn’t. 

When the car stopped, she snatched a breath, worrying that her heart-rate was going up and up. Panic attacks made you feel as if you were suffocating, she knew that from looking through her mother’s medical book when she was trying to identify what was wrong with Abigail Chesney without her having to see the family doctor, who was an old family friend of her father’s, and who Abigail didn’t trust not to tell her father if she admitted she’d been letting Ronny Mather get to third base. You were supposed to breathe into a paper bag, which she didn’t have access to. Or think calm thoughts, perhaps. She couldn’t find too many calm thoughts right now and it was taking all the self-control she had not to make pathetic little whimpering noises of fear that would make it clear that not only was she a victim but she knew she was. They had taken her purse with her hundred and sixty five dollars in it, and she was trying to tell herself this was a mugging, nothing more than a mugging.

They marched her along what felt like an unpaved track and then into a house, fingers pinching spitefully at her arm. She could hear a radio playing that they’d left on, then a door was opened and they pulled the bag from off her head. She had expected to be dazzled by light, but it was still dark. There was the sound of metal grating as one of them kicked down some steps, which unraveled like an arthritic snake, and pointed a gun at her. The steps were the kind used to get into the loft, only old and rusty and not the new aluminum ones that they had in their house, but these went down into a place that looked like a cellar. They gave her a shove and she just grabbed at the steps before she fell, making her way down with difficulty as she realized that both her hands and her legs were shaking. The steps creaked and groaned the whole time, even though she knew she wasn’t heavy, and shuddered like they were weeping the nearer she got to the last rung. She could feel damp air all around her, and was half dazzled by the sunlight streaming down from a window in the west wall of the building. The floor shimmered at her, but it was only as she jumped down awkwardly from the last step that she realized she was ankle-deep in water. The steps were hauled up behind her, a painful grate of metal sounding as the mechanism hitched.

It was only then that her eyes adjusted to the shadows in front of her, the other side of that shaft of light, and she realized that there was someone else in the cellar with her. The fear spiked to panic levels and she looked around for an exit, wondering if they had put her down here with a madman. 

“Hello…?” His voice sounded hoarse and he didn’t seem to be able to see her.

She snatched a breath. “Hello?” She stepped forward again, nervously, and this time her eyes had adjusted enough that she could see details. Her first impression was one of huge relief, because this wasn’t some weird guy who lived out of a shopping cart or kept skinned possums hung up over his window or ate people whose cars broke down near his house; this seemed to be a schoolboy. He even seemed to be wearing school uniform. She tried to remember what the uniform was like at that private school nearby. If he was a senior from some fee-paying school then he might be a jerk but he presumably wasn’t dangerous. In fact she was pretty sure she could take a private school boy no trouble at all and have him face down in the dirty water within the minute with her foot on the back of his head. She took another step and got him properly in focus and realized that he wasn’t a senior, after all, he was at least a college student, and he was having trouble seeing her because not only was the shaft of sunlight between them, dazzling him, but he only had one eye he could see out of right now. The other one, and most of the left side of his face, was just a big bruise. There were cuts that had bled, making him look pretty ugly, but on a better day he would probably have been handsome. He looked a little familiar and she wondered if she had seen him around town, one of those preppy students, not the art students who liked to play the guitar and protest a lot, but the ones who wore suits even though they didn’t need to yet, and who wouldn’t smoke dope in case it ruined their chances of getting into law school, and who were all young Republicans. Another pace and she saw there was blood down his shirt too; probably on his jacket as well but it didn’t show on the dark material the way the red spatters had stained his white shirt. He had dark hair that was sticky and untidy and he looked as he if he hadn’t shaved for a few days. His hands had been bound together in front of him, and there was a metal cuff around his right ankle attached to a chain that was presumably padlocked around the piece of rusting metal he was sitting on. He looked as if someone had been punching him for fun and the shadows under his eyes were so dark he looked like a drug addict.

Wincing, she went toward him. “I’m Tracy McAllister. Are you hurt?”

He tried to hold out his hand but was frustrated by the way his wrists were tied together. Giving her an apologetic smile, he said, “Sam Seaborn. I take it you didn’t come here voluntarily?”

His voice was also reassuring. He sounded sane; quietly spoken, Californian accent. And his name was ringing a bell in her mind. Like cold water being emptied over her it was coming back to her where she had seen his face before, and it hasn’t been in a café or waiting at a bus stop. And now she’d seen him and heard his name and no way in a million years were those guys upstairs ever going to let her go.

“You’re the guy who’s on the TV…” She crouched down next to him, trying to assess the damage and what she should do about it. “I figured you were probably dead. Or – you know – doing it as a publicity stunt to get elected.”

“No, oddly enough, I hardly ever get myself kidnapped by white supremacists to further my political career. Did they hurt you?” His gaze was searching, concerned, intelligent. And now she had him fully in focus and he was a man after all; ten years older than she’d first thought, and looking at her not like a college student but like a guy who was used to being in charge of his own destiny. For a moment she’d thought she was going to have to be the grown-up here, and although it wasn’t as if she wasn’t used to it, with Eli, she couldn’t help the rush of relief at the realization that perhaps she wasn’t going to have to be the one to solve everything this time. That there might be an adult here to help her instead of some squeaky-clean private schoolboy who would probably just sit there and cry anyway.

“Miss McAllister – ”

“You can call me ‘Tracy’, Mister Seaborn.” She didn’t add that it would be kind of comforting to have someone saying her real name after the names those guys had called her in the car. Telling herself that they didn’t even know her, and anyway were just thugs and nobodies, didn’t help as much as it should to stop her feeling shaken up by the level of hate and contempt in their voices.

“Okay, Tracy, and please call me ‘Sam’. It will make a nice change from ‘hey, you’ or ‘shut your mouth’. Did they hurt you?”

She shook her head. “No.” She had a handkerchief in her sleeve. It was old-fashioned and stupid, and there was nothing at all wrong with tissues, but her mother always said you should be prepared and a good-sized handkerchief could bind up a wound and no one had ever done that with a paper tissue. She took it out and went to spit on it, as she would have done if it had been Eli’s wounds she was trying to clean up after a fight. Seeing her hesitation, Sam Seaborn smiled, which made his lip break open and start bleeding, but was still a nice gesture. “There’s clean water there.” He nodded at the glistening trickle running down the wall. It had turned the wall green and mossy and looked a little slimy to her, but she dipped her handkerchief in it and then dabbed tentatively at the cut on his cheekbone and by his eye. 

“I know what I did to get them pi- angry, what did you do?” she asked.

“I didn’t agree with them. Apparently the Orange County Chapter of Redneck Morons Anonymous doesn’t take informed debate well.”

“My mom says it’s rude to call someone a redneck even if they are one.” Tracy didn’t in any way agree with that point of view, but she thought it was worth running by this particular grown-up.

She liked his petulant little scowl; it reminded her of Eli. “Well, I moved past caring about hurting their feelings one second after they shoved a gun in my face.” He gave her a searching look. “And you know that you’re not in any way responsible for their anger, don’t you? Getting born doesn’t constitute a crime in any civilized society. And last time I checked we were still living in one.”

“On the television they said you were ‘mild-mannered’,” she observed. “They used words like ‘communicator’ and ‘conciliator’.” Not feeling it necessary to add _but you just seem incredibly pissed_.

Sam Seaborn looked disgusted. “‘Mild-mannered’? Doesn’t that make me sound like a chartered accountant?”

“Or Clark Kent.” She tried to smile but she was feeling too sick and scared. “You just need the glasses.”

“Great, first I’m Batman’s sidekick, whatever his name was, and now I’m the boring side of Superman.”

“Dick Grayson,” she supplied. “And you don’t want to be the Boy Wonder?” She had eased most of the dried blood from the cut on his cheekbone, and although the cut looked deep she didn’t think the bone was broken. If she had been her mother, she would have known for sure. All she could be sure of was that it looked really painful.

“I have glasses,” he offered. “For being Clark Kent. I’m not comfortable being someone called ‘Dick.’ Or wearing my underpants outside of my tights, but that’s a conversation for another time when we know each better. Or perhaps for never at all.” He nodded his head at his breast pocket and she reached into it to extricate them. As she lifted up the frames, the last of the glass fell back into his pocket, tinkling as it did so.

She grimaced in sympathy but tried to keep her voice light too, just the way he was doing. “You don’t think ‘Clark’ makes you sound like a chartered accountant?”

“It’s still better than ‘Dick’.” He blinked at her, as if he was getting her into focus for the first time. “Do girls even read comics, because I always got the impression that they didn’t?”

“Got the impression from whom?” She was proud of that ‘whom’. They had studied its proper usage only the week before and she was almost sure she had just used it correctly in context for the first time. As she was also in a high stress situation she really thought she ought to get an extra credit for that.

“Girls – and the way they sneer sometimes. Quite often really. You don’t happen to have a knife or something of that kind, do you?”

She carefully reached into his pocket and extracted one of the pieces of glass, wrapping it in the handkerchief. “Are we going to kill them?”

He looked shocked. “I meant a knife for cutting my wrists free so I can help you to get out of here.”

She began sawing at the ropes with the edge of the glass. “Or we could use this.”

“Oh.” He looked at what she was doing and blinked. “I should probably have thought of that.”

 _All brains and no sense_ , Tracy thought to herself, but didn’t say it aloud, because it was something her grandmother said, which would make her sound very old-fashioned, and also she thought it was probably quite difficult to think straight when you were chained down here in the dark with people upstairs with guns who might be about to shoot you any second. She decided to make conversation instead to keep his mind on less depressing things. The fact it would keep her mind on less depressing things as well, didn’t hurt either.

“If this was a movie we’d probably have to kill them. But if this was a movie you’d be Brad Pitt and I’d be Hallé Berry and you’d be an ex-secret service agent who knew how to make gunpowder out of bubblegum.”

“They didn’t actually cover the gunpowder and bubblegum thing at Law School. It was more about how to limit someone’s liability. Some tort. Quite a lot about learning how to sue people.”

“Pity.” She looked up from the fraying rope to meet the eye he could still see out of. He had nice eyes – going by that one – blue, long dark eyelashes, not unlike Richard Wiley, who still hadn’t asked her to the Junior Prom. But they weren’t going to look anything like as good on a corpse. He was already looking a lot less pretty than he had on the TV news reports. “Why aren’t we getting you out of here as well?”

“Because I’m chained to a plow and you’re not.” He began to cough and didn’t stop for a worryingly long period of time. She didn’t like anything about the sound of that cough; it was wet and dry at the same time. She had waited for her mother in the hospital sometimes and whenever a patient coughed like that someone would say ‘pneumonia’. 

“I think you have pneumonia,” she offered.

“Yeah.” He didn’t meet her eyes. “Tracy, how old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Okay, so I’m assuming you know _why_ we have to get you out of here very quickly?”

She tried to stop that shudder coming, but the thoughts of hard hands and tearing clothes and their stink all over were too quick for her to duck. 

“It’s okay.” He closed his fingers around hers. “Of course, if you had a cell-phone that would make it easier, but we can….”

Her eyes widened in realization that she had been incredibly stupid and she dropped the piece of glass to delve into her brassiere, only remembering to be embarrassed a moment later, when she hastily turned away. She snatched the phone out and gazed at it then whimpered in frustration. “No signal.” She put it under his nose, trying not to weep with the sharpness of her disappointment. “No signal.”

She saw the hope fade in his eyes, saw him snatch a breath that really seemed to hurt him. She wondered if his ribs were broken; just how badly injured he was under those grimy clothes. She noticed he had a shoe missing and wondered how long exactly he had been left sitting in this sludge. 

“Hide it again. We’ll get you of here.”

She liked the way he said ‘we’, not ‘I’. She wondered if he had an elder sister who hit him when he said something unconsciously sexist, the way she did with Eli. If so she was going to keep right on doing it because it obviously worked. She felt around in the water for the piece of broken glass, pulling a face as she felt something disgustingly slimy touch her fingers, then hissing as she cut her fingers. She couldn’t even put them in her mouth after touching that water and had to wipe them on her dress. 

“Use another piece.” He nodded at his jacket pocket, and she plucked a piece out gingerly. 

“I thought you were from some private school,” she admitted as she sawed at the rest of the bonds. They had been bound so tightly his fingers were red and swollen, like the hands of an old man. “Just when I first saw you. Not once I got you in focus…” 

He still looked mildly affronted although he was clearly trying not to take offence. “It’s actually twenty years since I was last in high school.”

She was amused by that but thought it had to be a good sign that he could still make jokes. “Yeah, right.”

“No, really. I’m actually…” He sighed in resignation and then hissed in real pain as she sliced through the rope and his hands jerked apart. As the pressure on his wrists was suddenly alleviated, he gasped as the feeling came back into them. 

She felt a little sick, looking at his wrists. They were apart now but the rope hadn’t fallen away, it was still biting into the skin of his wrists. They weren’t just bruised, the rope had actually cut into him and even though she wasn’t squeamish and his face looked just as bad, somehow it was the thought of the edge of that rope just cutting in deeper and deeper and him hurting himself more every time he moved, that made her feel as if she really might have to pass out.

“Tracy…” His voice was kind but urgent. “It’s okay.”

She looked at his face and his wrists and heard them calling her those names again, even though they didn’t know anything about her. “No, it isn’t.”

He snatched a breath. “No, it really isn’t. But, we need to move quickly. By nightfall they’re always drunk and that makes them…mean.”

“Because they’re such sweethearts during daylight?” She was getting angrier the longer she sat here. She would have expected to feel more scared, and maybe this was what Mr. Jefferson called ‘displacement activity’, when you did one thing because you really wanted to be doing something else, like boys adjusting their clothing all the time because they were really thinking about how the cheerleaders looked doing the splits. But she kept remembering their hands on her and hearing what they’d called her, and seeing the blood on his face and his shirt and now oozing from his wrists, and she was getting so mad she wanted to break something.

“Please, Tracy.” He looked sad now, as if he’d have liked to foster that anger of hers, let her keep her warm with it, but the reality was that she was a sixteen year old girl and in an hour or so she was going to be a raped sixteen year old girl, unless she escaped. “They’ll use you to make me agree to do what they say. That’s why you’re here.” He nodded at the window. It was so high up on the wall, but it didn’t seem to be locked. She supposed they had thought it didn’t matter. They could drag that plow a few feet so he could stand underneath that tantalizing shower of light but he couldn’t climb up with a piece of farm machinery holding him back. 

She swallowed hard. “How do I know they won’t…do things to you when they find I’m gone.” She found she was shaking again and didn’t know if it was at the thought of never getting out of here, or escaping and leaving him behind.

He used his teeth to ease the rope out of his wrists, shaking the bonds off once they were loose as if he couldn’t even bear to touch them, he hated them so much, and then took off his jacket and put it around her shoulders, giving her a smile that was painfully sweet and unexpectedly boyish. “I’m not their type.”

She was absolutely sure that she wasn’t taking that jacket away from him when he was the one who was going to be left here in the damp and the cold. “No way.”

But he shook his head. “Your dress is too light. It’s getting dark out there, but if they shine a flashlight you’re going to show up. And there really isn’t time to argue right now.”

Reluctantly she pushed her arms into the jacket and wrapped it around her; it was too big and smelt of sweat but it was deliciously warm. She didn’t even want to think about how cold he was going to be down here without it. 

They dragged the plow together. The metal felt slippery and cold and it hurt her fingers, but they managed to drag it without making too much noise, just sending a wake of more filthy wet water to wash over their shins. When they had it under the window, he climbed up onto it, putting one hand on the wall and then nodded to her.

She climbed up, grabbing his arm to steady herself. “You don’t need to be their type,” she pointed out brutally, never feeling less like a teenage girl than she did right now, and at the same time never being more painfully aware that was what she was. “Not for them to kill you if they come down here and find me gone.”

“That’s why I need you to get away so you can call 911 and send someone here to save me.” He laced his fingers into a cat’s cradle and nodded up at that window so high above them. She was going to have to stand on his shoulders to have any hope of reaching it. He gazed right back at her, intent and bruised and that one blue eye looking right into hers as if she was the only person on the planet except for him right now. “I need you to be the Seventh Cavalry, Tracy. You really are my only hope of getting out of here alive.”

There was never really any question after those words that she’d be doing what he asked.

***

_One day earlier_

President Bartlet was striding down the hospital corridor at a speed that would have put a man to shame who stood a foot taller than him; the secret service agents were having to really hurry to keep pace with him. Leo thought it was just as well that these people ran beside cars for a living. He also thought that it was painfully ironic that they had ended up in California this week, after all; just not to give Sam support in the election. The election had become utterly irrelevant.

“What do we have, Leo?” Jed demanded. “Other than a sixteen year old girl with a bullet wound in her shoulder who is very lucky to be recovering in the St Joseph Hospital.”

“The girl’s conscious. Mike Casper is with her now, trying to get her to tell him everything she remembers.” Leo put a hand on his arm. “Sir, I really think she has enough to cope with right now without us barreling in there….”

Jed Bartlet looked hurt and then sighed and slowed his pace. “Okay. You’re right. Yeah. Was she…? The girl, was she…?”

It took Leo a moment to work out what he was asking; thinking how raw this was for the President, not just as the father of a daughter only a few years older than this girl, but the father of a daughter who had been kidnapped. “No, sir. She escaped before any of them….”

The relief washed over the President’s face. “Thank God. And she was wearing Sam’s jacket when they found her?”

“Yes, sir. She said…”

The doors were thrust open with violence and Josh ran towards them, hair disordered, jacket flapping, shirt wrongly buttoned, tie apparently lost somewhere on route. He had been more or less dressed when he had got onto the plane but he had slept the way people slept when they were too stressed to stay conscious, and had evidently woken up looking like this. “Is it true? This girl really saw Sam?”

“The FBI are just interviewing her now.” Leo rested a hand on Josh’s chest as the man seemed likely to charge straight past them. “We’re trying not to crowd her.”

Josh snatched a breath. “But she saw him? She saw Sam?”

Leo nodded. “That’s what they’ve got so far. She’s trying to identify where she was held, but she was blindfolded for the journey so she’s having to try to remember sounds and smells. And that’s only a few hours round from surgery.”

“Did she say how he looked?”

Leo looked past Josh to the approaching thunder that was Toby, CJ, and Donna, all charging towards them like disparate zoo animals unwisely released into the wild. CJ looked as if she had been sleeping in her clothes. Toby looked even grimmer than he had when there was no news.

President Bartlet answered for Leo: “He was alive, Josh. That’s a lot better news than we thought we’d be getting.”

Josh turned away, clenching his fists. “They’ll know she’s gone for help. They’ll kill him.”

“Not necessarily.” President Bartlet reached for a cigarette, noticed the ‘no smoking’ sign and put it back into the packet with a sigh. “When they shot at her it was dark. They could still be looking for her body.”

“He was alive?” CJ pressed just as Donna asked:

“How is the girl?”

Leo suspected he was going to be doing a lot of repeating himself until Mike Casper came out of that room. “Sam was alive and conscious when she left him. They were able to converse and strategize. The girl was shot in the left shoulder as she was escaping. It was dark and it’s not clear if the people holding Sam knew that they hadn’t killed her. She managed to keep moving, despite a broken clavicle and a lot of bleeding, and got herself through several fields and out onto a road, where she found a flatbed truck with its lights on as the driver – obeyed a call of nature. She got herself onto the truck – which was carrying various sacks of produce – and hid herself amongst the produce. Then she attempted to call 911. Unfortunately she passed out – probably from the blood loss – before she finished dialing. By good luck the truck driver was headed for the Farmers Market on Huntington Beach. She woke up when the truck stopped, and, still not identifying herself to the driver, got down from the truck and tried to walk to the hospital. She called 911 as she was walking away from the truck and the ambulance found her collapsed at the side of the road. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet been able to find the truck driver to find out where he would have picked her up.”

“Why didn’t she identify herself to the driver?” Josh demanded.

Charlie answered before Leo had to: “I don’t suppose she was feeling too trusting of strange men right then.”

Josh ran a hand through his hair. “They’re going to kill Sam for sure.”

“He’s all they have to negotiate with,” President Bartlet pointed out. “She can describe the place. If they shoot Sam we’re going to hunt them down and they’ll know it. And they won’t have more than a few hours to get ahead of the hunt. If they keep him alive they may be able to negotiate their way out of a shoot-out.”

“Or they may be confused enough by their options to achieve paralysis,” Toby suggested.

CJ said: “Was the girl…?”

“No.” The President shook her head.

“Thank God,” Donna said with feeling.

“We’re so close,” Josh breathed. “And so damned far away.”

“We’re going to find him, Josh.” The President was quietly adamant. “And he’s going to be alive.”

“If we do, he doesn’t leave the White House,” Toby said quietly. “I buy that damned chain. I maybe let him out on special release to the senior counsels’ office, but mostly he’s just in his office on a chain. We feed him bagels and coffee. Let him have a couch in there.”

“Isn’t that illegal?” Charlie put in.

“Who cares?” Toby countered. “What matters is that he’d be spending twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, in a place with the best security in the world.”

Donna sat down on an uncomfortable-looking chair, clutching her coat to her. “He must be cold without his jacket.”

CJ sat down next to her and took her hand. “That girl in there managed to run further with a bullet hole in her shoulder than I could manage on a treadmill. I don’t believe we’d get cut a break like that unless it was for a reason.”

Josh said bleakly: “Maybe there was only one miracle on offer and the girl got it.”

Donna was the only one who met his eye. “She’s sixteen, Josh. If that’s true, it’s the way Sam would want it.”

“I know.” He turned away to walk back to the window, gripping the sill. “I know that.”

“You’re the one who said they had a plan,” Toby pointed out. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe they…”

Josh spun around. “These people are idiots, Toby! They grab a girl off the street in broad daylight? Then put her in a room where she can climb out? And they do it in a state which has a Felony Murder Rule which states that any killing that occurs in the commission of an inherently dangerous felony – such as kidnapping – is treated as first degree murder. That’s twenty-five years to life. Or how about Penal Code 190.2 and its definition of a capital crime? ‘Murder by destructive device such as a bomb. Murder was committed for religious or racist motives.’ That’s the State’s in to ask for the death penalty. These people don’t care about dying. They’re looking to be martyrs. Or else they’re incredibly stupid. Either way, Sam would be safer in a war zone than he is in their custody right now.”

Leo cleared his throat. “The FBI believe that the people who snatched Sam are not the same ones who planted the bomb in the church. They think they’re a splinter group, possibly looking to impress.” He had been afraid at some point that the truth was finally going to make itself known to Josh and this seemed to be the moment when he had caught up with the rest of them in realizing that these people were unpredictably disorganized thugs with guns. He looked at his watch. “Mister President. You have a meeting at…”

As everyone looked at him with shocked and reproachful eyes, Leo gazed back at them levelly. “People might start to wonder who’s running the country right now as we’re all here. Not to mention the fact that there is nothing stopping Margaret from staging a coup d’etat the moment my back is turned. Apparently she has the President’s signature down pat.”

“We only practice it for fun,” Donna pointed out. As everyone looked at her, she grimaced. “A lot of our work is boring and repetitive. Sometimes we have to make our own entertainment.”

“Mike Casper’s already told us that they work better without interference.”

“We’ve come all this way,” the President pointed out. “I really want to see this girl.” 

Leo gave Charlie a look and as always Charlie picked up the hint, stepping into the breach at once. “That’s not a good idea right now, sir.”

“Why not? I’m right here. I’m ten feet away from the girl’s room.”

“Because the FBI need her to remember everything she possibly can if Sam has any chance of being saved, and meeting you to tends to make people forget their own name and what they had for breakfast, never mind something that happened to them while they had a bag over their head and a gun in their windpipe.”

There was a moment’s silence as the President mentally wrestled with what Charlie had said, trying to find a flaw in the logic that they all knew was flawless. Then he sighed and conceded. “Okay, but when this is over I want to see that girl. I don’t want her feeling…. She didn’t do anything wrong and she did a whole lot of things right and I want her to hear the President of the United States tell her that.”

Charlie nodded. “And I’m sure she’ll appreciate it, sir. But right now, you’re the last thing she needs.”

“Sam’s _here_ ,” Josh pointed out. “He’s probably an hour away from here. I’m not going back to Washington when he’s here.”

Leo sighed. “Josh, in case it’s slipped your notice, we’re the people who run country. We don’t get personal time. We’ve come here, we’ve heard what Mike Casper has to say. We’re updated, now we need to – ”

“I get why the President can’t see her, but _I_ need to see her.” Josh swallowed. “Leo, please…”

Donna gave Leo the begging eyes and Toby’s expression made it clear that he really felt Josh was owed this concession as well.

Leo sighed. “I’ll ask.” As he headed for the room, he wondered if they were ever going to be able to pick up the ball with this administration. He had heard Toby yelling after the news had first broken about Sam’s liaison with a call girl, and how they didn’t need an opposition – they managed that for themselves. With Leo’s alcoholism, the President’s MS, Josh’s shooting, Zoey’s kidnap, the murder of Fitz and hospitalization of Donna, and now Sam’s kidnap; it did feel as if this was the Presidency of the dramatic event rather than the ongoing policy sometimes. He also wondered just how difficult it was going to be to get everyone away from here. Privately, he had no doubt that Josh was right, and by helping that girl Sam had signed his own death warrant, and that was precisely why he didn’t want them to all be in California when they brought his body out. The second they got a message he was alive, the whole damned White House could take some personal time for all he cared, but until then, he felt this was probably the last place on earth where the President or Josh Lyman needed to be.

 

President Bartlet joined Josh by the window as Leo headed for the private room where the girl was recovering. There were almost as many secret service agents outside her door as when the President had been shot. Bartlet looked straight out of the window.

“I once told Sam he was going to run for President some day. I still believe that.”

Josh looked at him in shock. “When?”

“I’m sorry?”

“When did you tell him he was going to run for President some day?”

“The day we got China to stand down on the war games.”

He had hoped the power of his conviction might give Josh some comfort, but the man withdrew, looking at him with barely-concealed accusation. “That was a year before the whole dead guy running for Congress thing.”

“Yes, it was.”

“So, you planted a seed…”

“Josh…”

“Because I don’t remember Sam ever talking about running for office…”

“Just because he didn’t talk about it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t…”

Josh turned away. “I have to go and… I need to get some air.”

Bartlet watched him walk down the corridor, that arrogant walk of his left slightly lopsided with shock, as if he was no longer steaming along on his own power, but tacking against an unfriendly wind.

“What happened?” Toby asked.

Bartlet sighed. “Apparently it’s my fault that Sam ran for political office and therefore my fault he was kidnapped.”

Toby inclined his head. “Well, sometimes that’s what fathers are for, sir.”

“What?”

“Taking the blame for the decisions their children make.”

Bartlet ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t think I want to be a surrogate parent any more. I think it’s time I put the whole lot of you up for adoption. Well, except for Charlie.”

“Thank you, sir,” Charlie observed.

“Like that was ever in doubt. Leo gets Josh, which means he’ll want Donna, too; you get Sam, I keep Charlie, and CJ, obviously. I’m keeping her, too.”

“Thank you, Mister President,” CJ said dutifully.

Toby shook his head. “I don’t want Sam. He’s accident-prone and I have a son who, judging by his inability to crawl in a straight line, is already shaping up to be as much of a klutz as Sam is. I’m prepared to do an older brotherly thing from time to time, but I refuse to accept surrogate parental responsibilities for someone who looks nothing like me.”

“You think Sam looks like me?”

“Yes, sir, actually I do.”

President Bartlet turned to Charlie. “You don’t think Sam looks like me, do you?”

“Now you come to mention it, I think he kind of does.”

“I have never fallen off a sailboat in my life.”

“Have you ever been on a sailboat, sir?”

“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

“If you say so, sir.”

“If I ever was on a sailboat I would have the sense to hold onto a rope. I don’t think it can even be in question that the leader of the free world would – if on a sailboat – hold onto a rope. _Is_ it in question?”

Charlie shook his head. “No, sir.”

“And if Sam had been my son, he wouldn’t have gone to Princeton. He would have gone to Notre Dame. And he would have been taller.”

“How do you figure that exactly, sir?”

“I just know that he would.”

Donna looked down the corridor where Josh had disappeared through double doors. “Maybe I should…”

CJ put a hand on her arm. “He just needs to work this through.”

“But I…”

“He needs to do this by himself.” CJ lowered her voice: “He’s just so angry with Sam right now he doesn’t know what to do with himself. And Sam did the right thing. We all know it. Josh knows it. He had a moral obligation to get that girl out of that place, whatever the consequences.”

“And it probably got him killed,” Toby put in.

“I don’t accept that,” President Bartlet insisted. “I think Sam’s alive and I think we’re going to find him.”

“And I wish I could believe that too, Mister President,” CJ sighed, “but I don’t. I think right after they shot Tracy McAllister in the shoulder they probably went and shot Sam in the head. Then they cleared out so that when the FBI turned up all they would find is Sam’s corpse. And I think Sam had to know that it was a risk when he helped that girl to escape and he did it anyway.”

“It doesn’t make any sense to be angry with Sam,” Donna insisted. “He did the right thing.”

“No one’s disputing that he did the right thing,” Toby returned. “It doesn’t stop us being angry with him.”

Donna looked shocked. “You’re angry with him, too?”

“Of course I’m angry with him!” Toby walked to the window and back and when he spoke again his voice was lower. “He got himself kidnapped and now he’s probably got himself killed. And who cares if it’s unjust and unfair to blame Sam for living in a world where there are racist sociopaths? I don’t want my friend to be dead, and I think he probably is. I think he probably suffered and then he died for nothing, with no point made, or change achieved, just another victim of another pointless crime, and I am so angry with him right now that I kind of want to kill him myself.”

“So, it’s not just me?” 

They turned to find Josh had rejoined them from the other end of the corridor. He looked as if he had splashed some water on his face; his shirt collar slightly damp although no less creased.

Toby sighed. “No, it’s not just you. We all feel the same.”

“I don’t,” Charlie put in. “I’ve seen the tape and Sam had no chance to avoid being kidnapped, and as someone with a sister the age of that girl in there – that girl who isn’t dead and didn’t get raped because Sam helped her to escape – the last thing I feel towards Sam right now is angry. You should be proud of him.”

“Charlie’s right,” Donna nodded. “I’m not angry with him either. I’m proud of him for standing up for his principles and being a hero.”

“I don’t want him to be a damned hero!” Josh said angrily. “I want him not to be dead.”

“Well, I think he can be both.”

The President nodded to Donna. “I do, too.”

“The second that girl went out the window that was it. They stopped having all the time they wanted, and they had a few hours before she alerted the authorities. There’s nothing for them to achieve now except to cut their losses and run, and that means killing the guy who can testify against them and heading straight for Mexico.”

“And what are you proposing that he should have done, Josh?” Donna demanded. “What else could he have done?”

“Not get kidnapped in the first place.” CJ looked up. “Right?”

As Josh and Toby nodded, Donna rolled her eyes. “That is so unreasonable.”

Josh sighed as he took a seat next to CJ. “I’m not saying he did anything wrong. I’m just saying that if by some miracle Sam is still alive and we get him back…if Toby buys the chain, I’ll get the padlock.”

Donna gave Bartlet a pleading look and the man held up a hand. “It’s all right, Donna. I promise that I won’t let Toby and Josh keep Sam a prisoner in the White House for longer than…three or four months. Six tops.” He broke off as the door of the hospital room opened and Leo came out followed by Mike Casper.

“What have you got for us, Mike?” President Bartlet asked at once.

“No description of the kidnappers but a good description of the place where Ms McAllister and Mr Seaborn were held. And we have a lead on the driver of the truck. My men are following that up now. Once we have him, we think we can locate the property very quickly. In the meantime, sir, it probably complicates things for you to be here.”

President Bartlet looked down his nose. “Did Leo get you to say that?”

Casper forced a weak smile, his face taut with anxiety. “No, sir. I really think it would be better for you to return to the White House. We will keep you informed throughout the day of any new information…”

Josh had to walk away because he got it; he supposed they all did. Mike Casper was expecting to find the place, certainly, but he was expecting to be taking Sam’s corpse out of it in a body bag and he didn’t want the rest of them around when it happened. Or maybe he thought the President would insist on coming with them to the place where Sam was being held. Maybe Casper was thinking that he wasn’t going to be able to keep a control on an already fraught situation if he was also having to manage a bunch of distraught White House staffers. Maybe he was right.

Josh walked back to find that there was still talking going on, but it wasn’t important, it was them agreeing to go home and wait like good little civilians while Casper and his people risked their necks looking for a guy they were all pretty certain was already dead. “Can I see her?”

Leo sighed and then nodded. “Her mother agreed, so did the girl, and the doctors have reluctantly given their consent. Just keep it quick and keep it… You know.”

He knew. She was a teenage girl who had been through an ordeal. She had shown exceptional courage and resilience. He knew. Blaming her for the fact that Sam was probably dead now simply wasn’t on the agenda.

“So, I can go in now…?”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

That was Donna, of course, worried that he wasn’t going to handle it properly. 

“No.” He looked to Leo for permission and the man nodded again, expression concerned as he watched Josh heading for that door.

Behind him Casper and the President were still talking about search areas and the narrowing fields and the certainty of locating the place where Sam was being held very soon. Mike gave Josh a compassionate look that spoke volumes but his jaw had that tense set look of someone who was trying hard not to grind their teeth with anger. Josh remembered that Sam had been so convinced he was right when he went into see Mike about Daniel Galt, but that Mike had protected Sam as well as he could all the same. He’d called Nancy and asked her to let Sam know the truth and he’d never said ‘I told you so’ and the next time he’d seen Sam he’d been polite and friendly and Sam had bought him a drink and no further words about it had been discussed. Mike was invested in getting Sam back; very invested; and yet Josh noticed all the same that he said nothing at all about finding Sam alive.

 

It was different actually seeing her. She had been hazy in his mind. A girl who had made some wrong decisions while in a stress situation and ended up wasting time which might have saved Sam’s life. Seeing her was suddenly being confronted with the reality of not just what she hadn’t done, but what she had. Seeing a girl this young and slight with her left arm in a sling and all that bandaging around her shoulder and those tubes going into her, and those machines bleeping, seeing how sick and exhausted she looked, that was different. 

Collecting himself, Josh said awkwardly, “Hi, I’m Josh Lyman. I’m the White House Deputy Chief of Staff.”

“Mr. McGarry said you were Sam’s best friend.” She looked up at him and he winced from how bloodshot her eyes were. She really did look like hell.

“Yes, I am.” Josh held out a hand to her mother, and they clasped fingers over the girl’s bed. 

“Judith McAllister,” she said hoarsely. He noticed she had on a nurse’s uniform. 

“You work here?”

“Yes, I was on duty when the call came through. I sent her brother to school. It was just making him angry, being here.”

Josh thought about getting that call, the one that told you that your teenage daughter had been kidnapped; remembered the President getting that exact call; how the world dissolved around you; how the President hadn’t trusted himself to run the country because he had known his mind wouldn’t be where it needed to be; his judgment fatally affected. He noticed the cross at Judith McAllister’s throat and the way she unconsciously reached up to touch it as if it gave her strength.

“I figured that if I did all I could to help someone else’s daughter or son or husband or wife or mother or father, perhaps someone else would help my little girl.” She looked back at Tracy. “And they did.”

“You want to know about Sam?” Tracy leaned forward and then winced as her shoulder obviously hurt her. Now he could see her in close-up, Josh thought the girl looked close to collapse; eyes over-bright, as if she had a fever. She had been out all night, losing blood, then an hour in surgery, and no real time to recover. He felt abruptly ashamed of his anger towards her.

“I should let you rest. You’ve been talking to the FBI all this time. It was selfish of me to…”

“No.” She had to reach across to grab his arm with her good hand. “I’d like you to stay. I want to be useful. I made so many mistakes.”

There was a chair by her bed and Josh sat down on it. “Yes, because we all study What To Do When Kidnapped in high school.”

“I should have told the driver. If I’d just told the driver, he could have called the police right then. I don’t know why I didn’t…” She broke off to wipe tears away, so angry with herself that the last of Josh’s anger dissolved. “It’ll be my fault if Sam dies.”

“No.” He gripped her hand, squeezing it gently. “It won’t. It will be the fault of the people who killed him. Tracy, you got away, even though you’d been shot, you stayed conscious and you kept moving. You did _so_ much better than I would have done.”

“You don’t know that.” She wiped her eyes again.

“I do. Because when I was shot, you know what I did?”

“What?”

“I pretty much sat there and bled. I didn’t even yell for help. If Toby hadn’t found me, I’d still be sitting there. Except I’d be dead by now, obviously. I know what it feels like, the shock of it, all the pain, and the blood, and getting colder and colder while your mind’s still stuck on ‘What the heck just happened to me?’ Tracy, you did incredibly well. And if they get Sam out of that place alive, it will be because of you, and if they don’t, then it means the last thing Sam ever got to do was help save the life of someone else, which, believe me, he would like a lot more than just getting kidnapped and then getting shot.”

She still had tears running down her face. “I should have done better. I should – he should be safe by now. He gave me his jacket.” 

He noticed that she had something lying on the bed next to her, his heart lurching as he realized what it was. It had been cut off her by the surgeons and the left arm of the jacket was missing, but the rest of it was there. He reached for it and then hesitated. “May I…?”

She nodded, crying again, wiping the tears away impatiently as if she had no time for them, yet couldn’t stop them welling up each time. 

He picked it up and found his fingers clutching at it, unexpectedly as the odor hit him. It smelt of Sam. It smelt of Sam after a long, fruitless day bargaining with people who weren’t going to budge and knew they had the votes in Congress to thwart everything that was proposed. It smelt of sweat, and anger and frustration. He buried his face in it, inhaling, knowing he probably looked crazy right now, but taken aback by how much it meant to be touching something that had touched Sam when he was still alive. It really felt as if this was it; end of the road; and he knew the reason this cloth was still warm was because Tracy had been clutching it to her, not because of any residual warmth from Sam, but the illusion was comforting and heartbreaking at the same time. Everything started to spin and hiss and then Mrs. McAllister was putting her hands on his shoulders and saying:

“Breathe, Mr. Lyman. You need to breathe.”

He snatched a much-needed breath and managed hoarsely: “Please call me ‘Josh’.”

“I’m sorry,” Tracy repeated wretchedly.

Josh inhaled again, deep even breaths, the way he’d been taught when the anxiety climbed higher and higher and the music wailed its way into sirens coming towards him not quite fast enough. And behind that he heard other sirens, fire engines coming too late. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know all about both PTSD _and_ survivor guilt. “You’ve nothing to be sorry for.”

“He said I was his only hope of rescue.” 

Despite the guilt she was choking on right now, he was abruptly so envious of her it almost hurt. She had seen Sam only hours before. Been able to see for herself that he was alive and still breathing. He was probably never going to get that chance again. “Did he say anything else…?” For once, whatever Donna might have thought, he wasn’t hoping that Sam had mentioned him; he just wanted to know if the guy she had met had been his friend, after all, or if what those bastards had been doing to him for the previous five days had turned him into someone else.

“He said he was sorry he wasn’t Brad Pitt.” She took a deep breath. “I said if it was a film I’d be Hallé Berry and he’d be Brad Pitt and he’d know how to make a bomb or something. That was the last thing he said to me as he pushed me up through the window. He said sorry for not being Brad Pitt.”

“Anything else?” It was making her cry and yet he was so hungry for anything she could remember; anything that would tell him how Sam had been doing.

“He said they were redneck morons and I told him he shouldn’t call people rednecks and he said he didn’t care and he said he didn’t want to be Robin.”

Josh blinked in confusion. “What?”

“He said someone compared him to Robin and he didn’t want to be him. Was it you?”

“What?”

“Who said he was like Batman’s sidekick?”

“No. It was probably Toby. Sam was kind of his…sidekick. Not actually saving Gotham City, but saving oratory for those with an ear for cadence, that kind of thing.”

“You sound like him.”

“I’m from Connecticut.”

“No, I don’t mean the way you sound, I mean the way you talk.” She met Josh’s eye. “He wasn’t scared – in case you were wondering. He was…pretty mad mostly. At first I thought he was a schoolboy. His clothes looked like a uniform and he looked kind of young. But, once we talked I realized he was actually…kind of…magnificent.”

Josh smiled; seeing Sam in his mind’s eye telling Claypool he was a cheap hack and he was going to bust him like a piñata; finally catching up with Josh and Toby and realizing what Steve Onorato had been planning, grabbing for that phone on a red haze of righteous indignation; Leo talking about that Sam Seaborn-sized hole in the wall when Sam had gone after Kevin Kahn. “Yeah, he actually kind of is.”

“He really wasn’t scared.”

Josh rose to his feet. “Thank you.” He didn’t ask her how Sam had looked; that would have been the wrong question; she had told him what he needed to know, which was how Sam had been, and he hadn’t been scared. Softly he said again: “Thank you.”

He went out into the corridor, surprised when Mrs. McAllister spoke to him and he realized she must have followed him outside.

“Mr. Lyman…?”

“Please call me ‘Josh’, Mrs. McAllister.”

“I will if you’ll call me ‘Judith’.”

He nodded. “Your daughter is quite something, Judith. I don’t think I would have done half as well as she did in that situation, and I’m twenty five years older than she is.”

“I know she is. I’m very proud of her right now.” She laid a hand on his arm. “I just wanted to say that what your friend did – you should be proud of him too. He knew what the consequences would be and Tracy said he didn’t even hesitate.”

“Well, that’s Sam for you. He tends to be a Do The Right Thing At All Costs kind of guy. Obviously, being in politics, we’ve tried to knock that nonsense out of him, but so far without success.”

“If it turns out to be the last thing he ever did, try not to be angry with him.”

He moistened his lips. “I’m trying now, Judith. I really am.”

“Everyone in my church is praying for him.”

“Thank you.” He felt humbled by her sincerity even if her convictions weren’t ones that he could share. “I’m grateful. We’re all grateful for everyone who is sending him a positive thought right now.” As he turned to go, he hesitated. “What was Tracy doing when she was grabbed? Was she going to meet friends…?”

“She was going to buy a dress for her Junior Prom. She had a hundred and sixty five dollars saved up. They took it though. She says it doesn’t matter. I really don’t think it does, not in the scheme of things. I just wish that was the only crime those people had ever committed.”

Caught by her expression, Josh had to struggle to get the words out: “You’re going to pray for them too, aren’t you?”

She looked a little defensive and he wondered if she had already had this disagreement with her son. She had said he was angry. Josh didn’t blame him. 

“They’re all God’s children. And they all had mothers once.”

“You’re a better person than I am, Judith,” Josh admitted in a tone that made it clear he had no intention or desire to be better than he was right now. He was, in fact, very comfortable with his levels of murderous hatred. 

“We all carry the Lord within us, even if we have different names for Him. You just have to find him within yourself.” Then she was nodding a goodbye and going back into the room with her daughter.

Josh turned to find everyone else already gone and Toby waiting for him. “What did she say?” 

“Tracy McAllister said Sam wasn’t scared. She said he was angry.”

Toby gave the first glimmer of a smile Josh had seen cross his face since the news of Sam’s abduction had first come in. “That’s our boy.”

“And Judith McAllister said we all carry the voice of the Lord of our individual faith within us.”

“Well, the Lord of my individual faith is definitely a vengeful god. And, if they bring Sam’s corpse out of that place, the first rabbi to tell me that Vengeance is not Jewish is going to find out just exactly how violence begets violence.”

As they walked along the corridor, Josh glanced sideways at Toby, trying to assess him. “You wouldn’t really deck a rabbi, would you? I mean that would be…incredibly not good.”

“I might,” Toby admitted. “It’s been a while since I slept. I’m not really responsible for my actions right now.”

“Tracy said Sam didn’t want to be Robin.”

“I’d already told him we would keep those identities a secret. He was going to be my ward while I was being Bruce Wayne.”

“Dick someone?”

“Yes. No tights.”

“Sounds like you didn’t really sell it to him that well.”

“I may not have stressed the ‘no tights’ thing enough.”

Josh paused. “He was Sam, the guy she met in that place. The guy who helped her. He was still Sam. Whatever else they end up doing to him, they didn’t take away who he is.” 

Toby nodded and then patted him on the arm. “Come on, we’ve got a plane to catch.”

Josh stopped in his tracks. “I can’t go back to Washington when…”

”Josh, it’s for the best.” He could read in Toby’s eyes that he thought Sam was dead and that they were all going to need to be there for each other when the news came through. “We can fly back if we need to, but Mike Casper doesn’t want us to complicate things. He wants to concentrate on what he’s doing.”

Reluctantly, Josh got into the waiting car, and then even more reluctantly onto the waiting plane, while all the time wondering if they had found the driver yet, if they were closer.

The call came through when they were over Notre Dame to say that the driver had been found and that with his description of his route and Tracy’s description of the house they believed they had identified the place. Then it was a case of waiting to find out what happened next. And waiting. And waiting….

***

Tracy had been spotted running away by the kidnappers, by Sam’s estimation, about three minutes after her escape. Sam had been standing underneath the window, willing the world to stay still and silent, clouds scudding across distant stars, and Tracy invisible in the darkening dusk, vanished before anyone even realized that she was gone. But it hadn’t gone like that, of course; there had been a few blissful moments of calm when he had just dared to begin to hope that she was safe, and then there was the yelling and the gunfire while he tried and failed – through the debilitating haze of pure panic – to see out of the window so far above his head. 

They had been so pleased with themselves too. It had been possible for Tracy to reach that narrow aperture from his shoulders, and it had been fortunate that she was long-legged and slim and agile enough to haul herself up and out through a broken window. He somehow doubted Toby would have been able to manage that particular maneuver, for instance. She had looked down at him and he had grinned in triumph because they had done it, then given her the thumbs up, apologized for not bring Brad Pitt, and waved her on her way. He should never have let himself be pleased, even for an instant. He had forgotten the teachings of Toby and had tempted the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing and he hadn’t remembered to turn around three times and spit, and that made it all his fault that there had been gunfire instead of silence.

Even standing on the plow and trying to jump up and down had not provided a sight of the fields outside. His fear for Tracy had spiked with the first shot and hadn’t really come down, although as time crawled by and then crawled by some more, he had found himself starting to breathe in a more regular rhythm. Then he thought that the long pause could be because they were burying her and if she were dead it was his fault. He was the one who had told her to try the escape. If she was dead…

Some time after the gunshots, the door burst open and the ladder was dropped down, two of them storming down it and coming over to where he was sitting. They took in the plow dragged to its new position and one of them smacked him in the guts with a rifle. Sam went down hard in the filthy water, hitting his head on the edge of the plow as he did so. For a moment the water was over his head, as he tried to snatch some air and got only liquid sucked into his lungs, brown sludge filling his eyes, mouth and nose; and a hand on the back of his head holding him down there as the water rushed in and his lungs screamed for air they weren’t getting. He was yanked out and then shoved back under while things were yelled at him that he automatically mentally tried to punctuate. Despite his fear and the way his lungs felt as if they were going to explode, it really did bother him that he didn’t know if ‘mother-fucker’ was usually hyphenated or not. It wasn’t a word he’d ever had cause to use in a speech for the President.

He was still gasping as he was dragged upright and shaken, cursed, backhanded, and then knocked back down. Through the blossoming pain in his guts, and the water in his lungs, and the hissing sound threatening to send him spiraling into unconsciousness, a part of his brain was still reasoning, and it was certain that they would not have been this angry if they had succeeded in recapturing or killing Tracy. They were acting out of frustration, anger, and fear that the hostage they had grabbed to make him do what they wanted had now escaped them and could bring back help.

They unlocked his padlock and dragged him up to the usual room, to be smacked around some more, while they shouted at him. His head was pounding by that point, a sickeningly regular rhythm, as if someone was running on the spot in the soft tissue of his brain while wearing stilettos. People blurred in and out of focus and the pain was the only clarity, a sudden sharpening of vision, a blaze of light and color that then receded back into dimness. A gun was jammed into his mouth once, the barrel very cold against his tongue and tasting of oil, the ‘click’ as it cocked; his hair was yanked hard and the gun worked in deeper, as if they were going to make him swallow it whole, and then it was abruptly yanked out, clattering painfully against his teeth as it did so, and he was smacked against the wall. 

They were all as unstable as nitroglycerine, and he kept quiet, deciding that even mute disobedience was going to annoy them less than him saying the wrong thing. It wasn’t difficult to pretend that he was too dazed to comprehend them with blood pouring from a scalp wound and clogging up the only eye out of which he could comfortably see. When he shook his head to clear it, the blood spattered, like a red mist, and he thought about seeing that as his last sight, his own brains blowing out. Or would he be dead by then, and never see past the point the bullet reached when presumably life was extinct? He tried to do the math, wondering how instantaneous it was, if there was time for it to hurt. He thought about drifting up higher and higher away from his own corpse, and then his knees gave out and he realized he wasn’t drifting anywhere, just crumpling out of a mixture of exhaustion and starvation and probably fear. It didn’t particularly feel like fear, it felt like numbness, but he had to presume there was fear in there somewhere, as he definitely did not feel ready to die.

“We killed her.” The tallest one yanked him back to his feet. “If you were wondering, we blew her stupid whore bitch head off, and we’re going to do the same thing to you right now if you don’t…”

But Sam didn’t find out what it was they wanted him to do, because that was when the pain in his head did its own little thermo-nuclear explosion and he lapsed into blackness. He came to in the midst of an argument; one of them jabbing a gun against his head, another one talking about the need for a hostage, a third insisting he had definitely shot the girl and she wasn’t going to make it to the road, a fourth saying they couldn’t just sit around and wait for the police. Then there was a rapid flow of interruption and them shouting over one another in which scattered phrases alone were comprehensible. 

_We have to kill him now!_

_He’s the only thing we have to bargain with!_

_We don’t even know that they’ll come looking!_

With so many conflicting views, Sam couldn’t see anything be resolved any time soon. It was like a Quentin Tarantino-scripted Congress, and he felt an overpowering need to be asleep. He drifted off and came to again to find them dragging him back through the dank corridors of the house, past the broken floorboards they seemed to have been chopping up for firewood. Then there was the clank of the steps being slid down and then he was being manhandled down them, needing all of his powers of concentration to manage not to just fall down. He did a half-slither, half-controlled fall, while they grunted with annoyance and grabbed him by the hair or the collar to slightly arrest his plummet to the ground.

He hit the floor of the cellar hard and felt something in his ankle twinge agonizingly, but then someone was dragging him through the slush by the collar of his once really very good shirt and someone else was dragging the plow back to its previous position, sending eddies of water to ripple around his legs. He heard the clank of the chain and felt the now painful pressure on his ankle and didn’t even care as long as it meant they just went away and left him alone.

Sam winced as a gun barrel was dug painfully into his cheekbone. “You’re dead, Seaborn,” one of them snarled at him, and then they went away.

Sam really felt he should have earned a lot of bonus points from the Toby in his head – who was always so critical – for not pointing out that he was in fact alive. Which almost certainly would have made that guy come back and blow his brains out just to make a point. So, let no one say that Sam Seaborn had no basic sense of self-preservation just because he had, on occasion, forgotten to hold onto a rope while sailing. “Ha…” he murmured not very coherently, before dragging himself painfully up onto the plow and out of the water and then lapsing into a cold, uncomfortable sleep.

 

Later, Sam thought about how hard he had worked to try to get the message of the environmental lobby out there. He had written several speeches which talked about the little things that individuals could do to try to safeguard the limited resources of the natural world. And yet, ultimately, he owed his life to the fact that the splinter chapter of Orange County White Pride had never got around to fitting long-life light bulbs. 

He had been dreaming about watching fireworks light up the sky, then that had turned to a thunderstorm, lightning tearing across the darkness, stars hidden by sweeping drifts of cloud, the ground shaking with the thunder, and then the deluge, big splashy drops hammering down onto him, and he was in a foxhole and it was filling up with muddy water while howitzers roared overhead, darkness turning to brilliant blinding light as bombs exploded, while the water got higher and higher and he tried without success to pull his leg free.

He woke with a gasp to the rat-a-tat of real and present gunfire, the shock of if making him jolt off his precarious position on the plow and into the water. The dousing with freezing filthy liquid did at least wake him up although it left him shivering and coughing. As he struggled back up – the movement sending strobe lights of pain behind his eyes as he did so – he could hear people shouting incomprehensible things through a loud hailer, and people shouting back in between crashes of broken glass and more shooting. The pain in his head was still there but the sleep had helped. He did at least feel as if he had some cognitive function left which was more than he could have said a few hours before. He tried to get his watch into focus and then remembered that they had taken it from him days ago, along with his wallet, keys, and everything else except his clothes that might identify him. There was more noise from upstairs, footsteps thudding and something heavy being dropped. They were setting up more guns. They had rifles, he remembered, and a couple of semi-automatics. They had shown those to him sometime when they had been attempting to convince him of how efficient and dangerous and important they were. 

Despite the pounding in his head, his brain was only getting clearer and clearer. The people outside would be FBI; people like Mike Casper, people like the secret service agent, Molly, who had died protecting Zoey, and Simon Donovan, who had died in that store robbery shooting. Good people, and they were being shot at right now, and he wasn’t able to do anything about it because he was chained to a stupid plow in a stupid cellar in a stupid falling down farmhouse in the middle of a nowhere that was probably stupid too.

When the door to the cellar was slammed open sheer instinct made him dive down between the struts of the plow. Everything was in darkness and he guessed they must have doused the lights upstairs to make the job of the sharpshooters harder. Sam heard the sound of the light-switch being pulled and then pulled again and again, and then swearing from what sounded like the tallest of them. All this time and he still didn’t know their names. Of course they had never been formally introduced but he could probably have made the effort to find out; it had just seemed safer not to know, and Moron #1, #2, #3, and #4 had done well enough for him as a mental designation when he was identifying them in his own head. The tallest was the one who hit him the hardest, and had the shortest fuse, overturning all kinds of stereotypes about the bubbling irritation latent in all short men. Tall men seemed to have pretty short fuses too, going by this guy. If it had been the carroty-looking one, Sam would have presumed he was being collected to serve as a hostage as they made their escape, but the carroty one was the one who never blasphemed or cursed because they were the righteous armies of the right hand of God. Which had been kind of amusing because the carroty one was actually left-handed, which Sam had pointed out, although it had become less funny when the guy had hit him quite hard. But the tall one blasphemed quite often and was doing it now, and Sam doubted he was intending to use him as a hostage. 

The beam of a flashlight suddenly raked across the cellar, and Sam ducked down lower. Another burst of gunfire from outside and the beam of the flashlight was moving so fast it was a blur, it was only when there was a splash of water that Sam realized the flashlight had been lost. The water looked even stranger illuminated from below, murky strands suddenly backlit by a blue light, the water acquiring a strange beauty of swirling debris. 

“Fuck!”

Sam heard the snarl of anger and then the sound of a weapon being loaded and he was snatching a breath, closing his eyes, and ducking under the water between the metal struts of the plow. 

Then he was abruptly engulfed by the roar of the rifle, feeling the impact of bullets glancing off the metal and ricocheting off walls and window and tearing up the surface of the water; an explosion of glass sounding as the flashlight was presumably shot; and then a white hot pain lanced through his left shoulder and another pain seared his right side and the breath shot out of him in a gasp and he was swallowing filthy water, and coughing and had to put his head up. He snatched a desperate breath, and then dove back under the surface as another hail of bullets chattered all around him, ricocheting wildly above him while he heard the muffled sound of the impacts.

From what felt like a long way away, he heard the blast of what sounded like wood splintering, and then the bullets moved in an arc away from him and there was the rat-a-tat of more shooting, and then he was surfacing again, spitting out filthy water in which he knew that he had urinated and which tasted as if a lot of other people had done as well, and then there was another chatter of bullets and then a much larger splash than when the flashlight had fallen and everything was momentarily dark and quiet, although visual echoes of the gun-flare were still playing in front of his eyes. His ears were ringing and there was still pain in his shoulder and his side which was building in intensity, and he could feel himself shaking and realized he was probably going into shock now, and was very cold, and everything was dark and if he closed his eyes and laid down as he really wanted to, he was going to pass out and drown.

The beam of a much more powerful flashlight raked across the cellar and he ducked down instinctively, feeling the beam go over him and move away and then sweep back so he was trapped in the blue-white glare of it. Then someone shouted: “He’s here! He’s here!” And there was the clatter of the ladder and other shouts about the suspect not moving, and the suspect being deceased and the area being secure, and then someone was shining a light right in his face. He closed his eyes and turned his head away and then felt hands on his shoulders and a light that was not quite so dazzling.

“Sam…?”

He blinked in confusion because the face looking down at him seemed familiar. He felt a hand touching his shoulder that was gentle and practiced. 

“Sam…?”

Which was when he realized that he knew this man. “Mike…?”

Mike Casper’s face broke into a smile of sheer relief. “We really thought we’d lost you for good. Have you been hit?”

Sam almost said that yes, he’d been hit every time he gave them a back answer they didn’t like, and then realized that the man meant ‘have you been shot?’. 

“I don’t think so. Except maybe, yes, in my shoulder, and maybe my side, from a ricochet, I think.” Someone was shining a penlight into his eyes and talking about his pupils and how reactive they were and someone else was looking at his shoulder and someone else was shining a light into the water and talking about the plow and the padlock, and then there was the jangle of keys.

Mike said comfortingly, “We’ll soon you have you out of here now.”

With a jolt Sam realized that he hadn’t asked the right question. “Tracy, is she…?”

“She’s alive and being treated in the local hospital. Bullet wound to the shoulder, condition stable. She’s going to be fine.”

Sam looked down at the agent who was unlocking the cuff around his ankle then felt the sudden delicious warmth of a heated blanket wrapped around him, realizing in shock that he really wasn’t dead after all. “I owe her a really big ‘thank you’.” And then the need to pass out become temporarily overwhelming and he lapsed into a much warmer safer darkness than any he had known for days.

***

Josh was getting good at this – waiting by the bedside of someone he cared about while he or she lay there, wired up to machinery, looking pale and bruised and impossibly fragile. He couldn’t help thinking this had to be it for their luck. He had been saved by surgery after the shooting, Zoey had been rescued alive after her kidnapping, Donna had survived the explosion that had killed Admiral Fitzwallace and which, logically, should have killed her, and now here was Sam, stubbornly not dead. The next one of them to trip on a sidewalk was probably going to fracture his or her skull at least.

The room was a mass of flowers. Some of them had arrived before Josh; some had been carried in since. There had been no question that he was flying straight back. No one had said anything except ‘Take as much time as you need’ even though he had been all geared up for an argument and had his answers all lined up in readiness.

“I just think he should wake up to a friendly face…” Josh had offered a little shamefacedly, still trying to have the fight Leo hadn’t given him.

“Two friendly faces.” Toby stood in the doorway with a suitcase in his hand. 

“But we… Can you…?” Josh darted another look back at Leo, still expecting an argument.

Leo just nodded. “Good idea. You can stop Josh putting his foot in his mouth.”

“Sam might need to issue some kind of statement,” Toby added. “I was thinking that if I was there, I could help with that.”

“What about CJ? Won’t she…?” Josh felt duty bound to at least pretend that he cared about anything other than being beside Sam’s bedside right now.

“Under control,” CJ insisted. “I’ve got the report from the FBI and from the hospital. Mike Caspar is going to talk to the press after me. Everything’s fine. You two should go.”

And they had. Toby was out getting coffee now and CJ was on the TV again for yet another press briefing. Josh leaned forward to turn up the sound:

“I can tell you that Sam Seaborn has successfully undergone surgery to repair damage from a bullet wound and an injury caused by the ricochet from another bullet. Both bullets were fired by one of the kidnappers, who has now been identified as Carl Hathaway, aged twenty-three, deceased. You already have the names of the other kidnappers. Mr. Seaborn is also suffering from pneumonia, malnutrition, dehydration, and multiple contusions but is expected to make a complete recovery – ” 

Josh watched as a forest of arms shot into the air and saw CJ nod. “Yes, Katie?”

“Now that the first elation has had time to fade, how does the President feel about the ordeal Mr. Seaborn underwent at the hands of…”

“I’m going to stop you right there, Katie, because the ‘first elation’ has in no way had time to fade yet. We’re still at the stage of pinching ourselves to be certain we’re not dreaming. Yes, Steve?”

“Would it be accurate to say that the White House did not expect such a positive outcome to the kidnapping of Sam Seaborn by the Orange County White Pride?”

“We think the kidnapping was actually undertaken by a splinter group unaffiliated to Orange County White Pride. Orange County White Pride has, however, been linked to the bombing of the Calvary Baptist Church, but, as to outcome, we always hoped for the best but are still relieved and delighted that Sam Seaborn is only in the hospital right now and not in the morgue. Terry?”

“You mention several injuries, including multiple contusions. Was Sam Seaborn beaten by his captors?”

“Yes.” 

Josh admired the way CJ said that without a muscle flickering in her jaw, the way it would have been if either he or Toby had answered that question. 

“Can you give us a little more, CJ?”

She referred to her notes. “The preliminary reports from the doctors and FBI say that Sam Seaborn was subjected to repeated beatings by his captors for his failure to comply with their requests for him to…I suppose the word we’re looking for here is ‘recant’ from his position on immigration and marriages between people of different races. Nor was he offered any food or water during the time of his captivity although according to Tracy McAllister he told her that he had been drinking the water that ran down from a broken guttering, not the water in the cellar, which is apparently contaminated. He is being given a course of antibiotics to deal with the infection from that water.”

Steve frowned. “CJ, if he didn’t drink the contaminated water, how come he needs antibiotics to combat it?”

“Apparently they held his head under it a few times, and he was forced to take refuge under the surface of it when Carl Hathaway was attempting to execute him with a semi-automatic rifle. Yes, Danny?”

“What is Sam’s condition now?”

“I spoke to his doctor on the telephone a few minutes before this briefing and he said that Sam was comfortable after surgery to remove the bullet from his shoulder.”

“Is anyone from the White House with him?”

“Josh Lyman and Toby Ziegler are both with him. I’m not sure if that’s the two faces I’d want to wake up to but as Sam was unconscious at the time they got on the plane he wasn’t given a lot of choice in the matter. Yes, Wendy?”

“Is the President aware of the efforts made by Senator Taylor to assist in the release of Mr. Seaborn?”

“The President is indeed aware of and grateful for the efforts of Senator Taylor and has privately communicated his gratitude to the Senator.”

“Will Mr. Seaborn still be running for office when he recovers?”

“I think that’s a question for Mr. Seaborn, although listening to my colleagues in this building I think he may have some trouble doing so on account of the ten foot chain it has apparently been unanimously decided will now be tethering him to Toby Ziegler’s desk.”

The laughter from the Press Corps sounded genuine and warm and Josh was reminded again of just how many people had been out there praying for Sam’s safe return.

Danny nodded. “You’ll tell Sam we were all asking after him?”

CJ smiled back. “I’ll do that, gladly. Now, I’m sure you’ll want to make a note of these projected yields for beets and green beans…”

When he looked back at the bed, he saw Sam stirring, and pulled his chair closer, leaning forward to watch him intently. It was still a shock to see Sam like this. His face was badly bruised, purple, blue, and yellow contusions under newer, redder ones. His left cheekbone had been padded but was apparently not broken, just cut and bruised. His dry lips were cut and swollen and a thick scab was still healing across the lower one. According to the doctor, the other cuts at the side of his mouth had been caused by hunger rather than a gag, which was something, Josh supposed. Denying Sam a voice seemed crueler than denying him food, although perhaps he wouldn’t have so many bruises right now if they had shut him up. His wrists also showed blue-black bruises around the edges of the bandage. Two of his ribs were cracked and had been strapped up. Josh had lifted the sheets to look and been shocked by the clear imprint of the boot-soles on Sam’s skin and how visible those ribs were, even through the bandages. They had told him Sam had lost weight but that the fluids being fed into his system through an IV were already dealing with that. The doctor had assured him and Toby that there had not been time for any kidney damage and they expected Mr. Seaborn to make a complete recovery. The bullet was out of his left shoulder and the wound well bandaged. His arm would be in a sling for a while but he would heal. Everything was temporary, fixable. Josh kept swinging from shock at the sight of Sam, the epitome of sickeningly vibrant good health, looking so thin and pale and battered, and these waves of mingled relief and panic because Sam was alive, alive, alive, and yet had so nearly been dead, dead, dead.

Mike Casper had told them that Hathaway had only failed to kill Sam when he had been trying to because the bulb in the cellar had blown, meaning that he had been forced to spray bullets around indiscriminately instead of getting in some well-directed fire. As it was, the wall behind Sam had been pock-marked with bullets, some of which had lodged but a lot of which had rat-a-tatted all around the cellar, pinging off everything they hit, including the plow under which Sam had been sheltering. If Sam had not shown sense enough to get down low, even though that meant submerging himself in contaminated water, then he would have been riddled with bullets. As things were, he had only been hit directly once, and had a cracked clavicle and shoulder bone to show for it, and had been hit a second time by a ricochet that had grazed his side. 

“Sam did everything right.” Mike Casper had nodded at the bed with a hint of pride. “There was nothing he didn’t do that was sensible.”

“Except for mouthing off to people with really big guns?” Toby countered.

Casper half-smiled, trying to repress it but with a definite twinkle in his eye. “Okay, except for that. We probably wouldn’t have advised him to do that.”

Josh was still talking to Casper when Toby had tentatively asked the doctor who had examined Sam when he was first brought in if Sam had… that was, had there been any other kind of…assault. Had he been…? Or rather, could the doctor assure him that Sam hadn’t been…?

Turning in shock, Josh gazed at Toby open-mouthed as the doctor assured him that no, Mr. Seaborn had not been sexually assaulted in any way.

“You were thinking…?” He was horrified by the possibility of that thought; feeling a wave of sickness flood through him not only because he was now thinking it and it hadn’t occurred to him even for a millisecond until this point, but because Toby had been carrying that thought for presumably a week now; having that eat away at him along with all the other horrors Josh _had_ been able to imagine.

“I just…” Toby turned away. “It was a possibility. They weren’t nice people and Sam’s… You know.”

“Yes.” Still feeling sick, Josh reached for a chair. “I do. Oh God, they could have… Why didn’t you say something…?”

“Because I didn’t want to put the look on your face that’s there right now.”

Josh held onto the arm of the chair. “They could have…” He snatched another breath. “They really could have… And I didn’t even think….”

“Josh, them killing him would have been a lot worse and you were already thinking that.”

“It’s the fact I wasn’t thinking about…that other possibility. He could have been in that place with those four guys…. I never even imagined….”

“It didn’t happen.” Toby was reaching in his pockets. “Just try to focus on the fact it didn’t happen.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t even think they could have been… I mean, everyone knows Sam is…”

“I know.” Toby nodded, still feeling in his pockets with increasing agitation.

“We don’t talk about it because he doesn’t like it.”

“Well, no… though actually, I think there are worse crosses to have to bear in life than being too good-looking, myself, but…”

“He was beaten up in school. You know how he is.”

“Don’t you think he was probably beaten up in school because he was a freakish little nerd who always did his homework on time and probably asked for more, rather than because he was a little too pre-”

“Don’t say it!” Josh held up a hand. “We don’t say the ‘p’ word. Even CJ doesn’t tease him about that. And what are you looking for anyway?”

“A paper bag.” Toby said it as if it were obvious. “I thought you were going to throw up or need to breathe into one, whatever it is you do when people go into hysterical hyperventilative states.”

“‘Hyperventilative’ isn’t a word.” Josh sank onto one of the uncomfortable waiting room chairs.

“Well, it should be because it’s what I need for this particular sentence.”

“So, we’re just making up our own words now?”

“Why not? It works for the Vice President.” Toby snatched a breath and took a moment to let the truth wash through him. “Josh, what we need to be focusing on right now is that it didn’t happen. Sam didn’t get…you know, he didn’t get maimed, and he didn’t get killed. He isn’t lying on a slab somewhere, he’s out of surgery and into recovery, and he’s going to be okay. And, at some point in the dim dark distant future, when we’ve both had therapy and possibly been prescribed some very powerful drugs, so are you and I….”

 

Now, a few hours later, Josh reached out and slipped his fingers between Sam’s, just needing to feel the warmth of his skin against his hand, the way someone felt when they were alive and their blood was circulating correctly, rather than pooling on the ground. Thick dark eyelashes flickered and Josh leaned further forward, wanting his face to be what Sam saw when he woke up, not the scary impersonal wall of a hospital or all those flowers that might make him think he was dying.

“Hey…” he breathed.

Sam’s eyelashes flickered again and he opened his eyes, wincing at the brightness of the room. The brilliant blueness of his eyes was a shock after the bruising around them and shadows beneath them. Sam tried to moisten his lips and then managed a weak smile. “Hey, back…”

Josh couldn’t stop that idiotic grin breaking out. He reached out with the hand that wasn’t gripping Sam’s and stroked a few strands of untidy hair back from his forehead, trying to keep his voice steady and normal and not all quavery and tearful and choked up with relief: “Your mother and I were very worried.”

“Sorry.” Sam tried to moisten his dry lips with his dry tongue, still blinking owlishly at the light. Josh remembered how that felt, waking up with a head full of anesthetic and that muffled sensation coursing through your body from the morphine.

“You’re all in one piece and you’re going to be okay. But you scared the hell out of everyone, so don’t ever do it again.”

“Is Toby angry with me…?” Sam croaked out hoarsely.

“You’d better believe it.”

At the sound of that grim pronouncement, Josh looked around to see Toby had come back into the room and was also gazing at Sam with a big stupid grin on his face. He strode across to the other side of the bed and also reached out to touch Sam’s hair, seeming to need that same reassurance that he was still there and still whole. 

“You got yourself kidnapped. Of course I’m angry with you.”

“In my own defense, I did not, in any way, do it on purpose…” 

“Well, you’re no longer allowed to walk the streets of California by yourself. Or indeed any part of America. Or any other country. From now on, you get a chaperone to go to the bathroom.” Toby picked up a carton of water with a straw and held it where Sam could drink. “You need to concede to Taylor and come back to the White House where we can all keep an eye on you.”

Josh looked at him in shock. “I thought we weren’t going to spring that on him the second he opened his eyes.”

“ _You_ weren’t going to spring that on him. I always intended to.”

“Can we establish that he’s okay first?”

“No. I have a lot of anxiety I need to displace. Also, no one to help me write speeches. I don’t think it needs to be discussed. I think Sam needs to nod his head and do whatever I tell him. Forever.”

Josh gave Sam a rueful smile. “I don’t want you worrying about us overreacting or anything. In fact I just want to take this opportunity to assure you that we’re going to be reasonable and fair-minded about you putting us through a week of unmitigated hell, and will not in any way hold it against you.” Looking across at Toby’s face, Josh grimaced. “Except for Toby. Who probably is going to hold it against you for a while.”

“Make that a lifetime.” Toby gently supported Sam’s head as he gratefully gulped down the water.

Sam swallowed and then grabbed some air. “You sounded just like that in my head.” He grinned at Toby as if he was one of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen. “When I was in that cellar I had some – actually very interesting – conversations in my head, and I kept imagining you commenting on everything I did, and you sounded exactly like that.”

Toby put down the water, a little nonplussed. “I was haranguing you in your head through your time of imprisonment?”

Sam nodded eagerly. “Yes.”

“I didn’t offer you sage words of advice and comfort?”

“Not really.”

“I didn’t say nice things to you about how much I missed you and how we all knew you could pull through this thing…?”

“Not so much,” Sam admitted. “You mostly just yelled.”

“I was nice to you, right?” Josh squeezed his hand. “I said nice things to you in your head?”

“You mostly yelled too.”

Toby and Josh exchanged a glance. Toby sat back, a little hurt. “Did any of us not yell?”

“President Bartlet was interested in my lecture on the history of the Bible. And Donna was very sweet.” He turned to Josh. “Can you thank her for that when you see her?”

Voice rising a little, Toby said: “Can I just point out who it is, out of all the people with whom you used to work, who are currently sitting at your bedside, having flown across the country in the middle of the night to be here when you opened your bloodshot little eyes?”

Sam bit his lip in an attempt to stop a smirk. “It really is indescribably good to see you both again.”

“And you have no idea how good it is to see you,” Josh said with feeling.

Sam gazed at him with undisguised sincerity. “I was there when you were going through surgery, Josh. I know what it’s like to be the one waiting for news.”

Toby got up and walked over to the window. “I may be prepared to extend the length of the chain to twenty-five feet. Let no one say that Toby Ziegler is not willing to negotiate.”

“I think everyone does say that who…knows you,” Sam pointed out, apparently more in the interests of total accuracy than to be snippy, as he looked suitably penitent when Toby glared at him. 

“If you made it fifty feet he could reach the Oval office and attend the Senior Staff meetings,” Josh pointed out.

“I was thinking perhaps a leash would be appropriate for that. I think you can buy retractable ones these days.”

“I just spent a week chained to a plow,” Sam pointed out. “Which is a lot less fun than you might think. I’m off bondage for the foreseeable future.”

Toby blinked. “You were on it before?”

Sam paused and moistened his lips. “And there’s an outside chance I could have phrased that better.” He focused on the bouquets. “I see lots of flowers.”

“Yes.”

“Is there a fruit basket?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What about chocolates?”

Josh indicated his IV. “You’re having your fluids replaced.”

“I don’t want to have my fluids replaced. I want to eat lots of food. A Snickers bar would be a good start if you happen to have one about your person. Otherwise I’m sure there’s a vending machine somewhere down the hall.”

“You don’t eat chocolate. You eat healthy snacks that don’t affect the integrity of your scarily white teeth just to annoy and perplex the rest of us,” Toby pointed out.

“That was before I got left in a cellar with no food. Now I eat anything that isn’t moving fast enough to avoid me biting it.” Sam eyed up Josh’s leg. “What’s the Democratic position on cannibalism, anyway?”

Josh shifted his leg away. “The same as the Republican one. You have to be in an airplane crash first and you should preferably be…foreign. Eating other human beings is generally considered un-American.”

“What about the Donner Party?”

“We like to think of that as an anomaly.”

“Well, I think it’s a position that we should rethink. We’re naturally omnivorous and I think it could be some kind of denial of our first amendment rights not to let us eat human beings who don’t give us chocolate when we really, really want it.”

Josh got to his feet. “I’m getting him a Snickers bar.”

“The nurses will have you down like a roped calf before you’re halfway to the vending machine,” Toby pointed out.

Josh reconsidered. “I’m getting a nurse. She can tell Sam-I-was-starved-for-a-week-Seaborn why he isn’t allowed chocolate. Let’s see how she does against the big blue eyes and quivering lower lip treatment.”

“If he bats his eyelashes to get his own way, I’m going to use the ‘p’ word.”

Sam looked down his nose at him. “You can use the ‘f’ word for all I care. I want chocolate or sugary food of some kind and I don’t care how I get it and I think it’s only fair to warn you that I would sell you both to white slavers for a Twinkie right now.”

Toby looked across at Josh. “He’s turning into my ex-wife right before my eyes. Any minute now he’s going to be making me defend my government’s compromise on the school voucher system in Washington and then insisting on organizing a fact-finding mission to a refugee camp in Somalia.”

Sam waved a hand in his direction. “Actually, I don’t agree with your compromise on school vouchers and I don’t think we should have pulled out of Mogadishu when we did. What do I press, pull or shake to summon a nurse?”

As his phone rang, Josh stepped outside to answer it, nodding to a nurse as he did so and indicating that Sam was awake. He had left the door open and could still hear Toby and Sam wrangling over the school vouchers and what the mayor had said about them, and why Charlie had supported him.

CJ’s voice sounded reassuringly clearly on the other end of the phone. “How is he?”

“He’s awake. I was just about to call you.”

“And how is he…?” 

He got what else she meant; not just how was he physically, but mentally, emotionally. Needing to know who exactly had woken up in that hospital bed. Josh couldn’t help that grin breaking over his face as he heard Sam telling the nurse what he was willing to give for a Snickers bar right now and how it included his entire collection of Gilbert & Sullivan CDs except possibly for The Pirates of Penzance, and perhaps The Mikado. 

“He’s Sam, Claudia Jean. He’s a hundred percent, accept-no-substitutes, the genuine article, Sam Seaborn.”

He heard her snatch a breath of relief. “He’s…he’s okay…?”

“Well, he looks like crap, but he’s sitting up and taking notice and demanding chocolate.”

“Tell him I’m sending him chocolate. Tell him I’m doing it right now. Carol…? Sam needs chocolate. Can you arrange…? Yes, Godiva, the biggest box they make. No, make it the gift basket – the one with the biscuits and the truffle assortment. Right away. Josh, will you tell him…?”

Josh grinned. “He won’t be allowed to eat them. They’ll put him on protein shakes and energy bars.”

“You make sure he gets the chocolates. And if you and Toby eat them, I’ll know. And tell him I’m coming to see him as soon as I can. And tell him I love him and give him a kiss from me.”

“Uh – no,” Josh assured her. “I really won’t.”

“You’re worrying about your machismo _now_?”

“Yes.”

“That’s pathetic.”

“No, it’s what makes Man…Man.”

“It’s beyond pathetic.”

“Look, I already held his hand and stroked his hair and probably said some fairly soppy things to him. I think that’s as wet as I can be without – you know – looking like a complete girl.”

“Sam didn’t care what he looked like when you were in surgery. All he thought about was you.”

“That’s why Sam used to get beaten up every recess and never saw his lunch money for dust. You wouldn’t ask Toby to kiss him.”

“Josh, you complete idiot, he nearly died and I haven’t been able to see him yet, I’d ask the _Majority Leader_ to give him a kiss from me right now. Now go and do it and don’t forget to tell him I love him or the next time I see you I will put my stiletto right through your foot.”

Josh sighed, put away his phone, and went into the room where Sam was ravenously gulping down a protein shake. 

“It’s chocolate-flavored,” Toby explained. “The art of compromise. I brokered the deal.”

Josh walked over to where Sam was sitting in the bed and kissed him on the forehead. “That’s from CJ, who loves you, apparently.”

Sam gulped down his mouthful of shake and looked up at Josh open-mouthed. “You kissed me.”

“It was from CJ.”

“You kissed me in front of Toby.”

“It was from _CJ_.”

Sam grinned and stuck the straw from the protein shake back in his mouth. For all the bruises, he already looked a lot less fragile than he had when he had still been unconscious and Josh had been willing him to wake up. Through the straw and the sipping, Sam said triumphantly: “I have to tell you, Josh, that it is my carefully considered opinion as a lawyer that you totally look like a girl right now….”

Josh’s repeated insistence that the kiss had been from CJ met with a snort of derision from Toby and something that was very close to a titter from Sam.

“I’m cutting off your morphine,” Josh told him. “That’s it for you. No more pain relief.” Then as his grin of relief threatened to split his face in two, he leaned back over Sam, pulled him into an embrace, pressing a kiss into the soft dark tangle of his hair. “Okay, that was from me.” He leant his forehead against Sam’s feeling the warmth of that slightly feverish skin against his while he tangled his fingers in Sam’s hair. “It’s good to have you back, Sam.”

When he pulled back, Sam was gazing up at Josh with damp eyes, moved by the obvious sincerity in Josh’s words. “It’s good to be back.”

Josh reached across to wipe under his bruised eyes gently with his thumb. “Now who totally looks like a girl?”

As Sam smiled, Josh sat down next to him on the bed, putting an arm around his shoulders carefully and then pulling him in against him, so there was no doubt that Sam Seaborn, in his silly little hospital gown, was a living breathing miracle of warmth against his body. When the adrenaline ebbed and the shake hit home and Sam’s eyelids began to droop and then to close and his breathing evened out into a slow even rhythm, Josh gently lowered him back onto his pillows while Toby stood and watched. Josh carefully covered him with the blanket and then leaned across to kiss him on the forehead again. “That one’s from Donna,” he explained to Toby. 

Toby just nodded, trying and failing not to look a little choked-up himself. “We got him back, Josh.”

“Yeah.” Josh stood up but kept gazing down at the bruised face of the friend who had come back to them the same man he had been when he was taken. “We really did.”

***

Hayden Taylor was in the room with Sam when CJ arrived. Although she was bursting to go in there and hug him breathless, she waited to give him a few moments with the man.

“I wish I could persuade you to reconsider, Sam…”

“I don’t see how either of us could campaign on the issues, right now. If I ever get a seat in Congress I want it to be because of what I believe in, not because I got kidnapped and people feel sorry for me.”

“There’s no reason to suppose that we can’t still run a campaign on the issues.”

“The polling data says otherwise. I haven’t been campaigning for the past ten days and my popularity has doubled. Tell me that’s because of the issues?”

Taylor walked across the room. “I’ve wanted to be a Congressman for a very long time but I see the same fire in you. I know this is what you want. And you can win it. For your party, for yourself.”

“Sir, with all due respect, why do you care?”

Taylor turned to look at him. “You don’t want to win because you got kidnapped, Sam? Well, I don’t want to win because you got kidnapped either. Those…people wanted you out of this race. They took offence at what you said and they bustled you into the back of a car at gunpoint because of it. If you stand down, how did their agenda not win? How are we not giving them what they want?”

Sam shook his head. “You’re not what they want, sir. You’re nothing at all like what they want. You said it yourself, you’ve wanted this for a long time. You want to represent the people of Orange County. You think you can do what’s best for their needs. I think I can too, but what I can’t get in this County right now is a fair election. I am never going to know if I have a mandate from the people who voted for me or if they just felt sorry for me and are relieved I didn’t die.”

“Either way you’d be in Congress, and it’s not as if your party doesn’t need every vote it can get there right now. And I wouldn’t be standing here right now, encouraging you to run against me, if I didn’t think I could beat you on the issues _and_ that if you got elected that you wouldn’t do a good job.”

“I wouldn’t know and it wouldn’t feel right to me. I appreciate you coming in here, but my mind is made up.”

Taylor sighed and then nodded. “I’m sorry that it’s going to be resolved like this and I can’t help feeling those thugs scored some kind of victory here that neither of us really want to hand them, but I’m not going to harangue you when you’re wired up to all that machinery. You do know the Democratic Party is going to skin you alive though? You are throwing away a seat for them and I’m saying it because I know they’re going to and they’re going to say it a lot louder.” 

Gazing through the half-open door, CJ was in time to see Sam cough weakly and look pathetic, eyes fluttering with exhaustion. Then he gazed up at Taylor and smiled. “They wouldn’t berate the sick.”

Taylor laughed, and squeezed Sam’s good arm gently. “Get better, son. It’s very good to see you alive and relatively well.”

Sam gazed up at the man, no humor on his face now. “Thank you for everything you did, sir. Josh and Toby told me about the TV appeals and how you had people leafleting…”

Taylor shook his head. “Enough of that. You would have done the same for me and anyway for all you know it was just cynical electioneering to make me look good.”

“I know it wasn’t.” Sam’s blue gaze was unwavering. “And I’m grateful and I have to tell you that so is my mother. She’s definitely planning to vote for you. Of course, I also think you’re reaping the benefit from the fact that I’m kind of in the dog-house right now on account of getting myself kidnapped.”

“She wrote to me.” Taylor half-smiled. “As did the President and all of your colleagues. I appreciate that very much but I still maintain I only did what any halfway human being would do. And, incidentally, your friend, Josh Lyman, has unreadable handwriting. Tell him I said so.” He clapped Sam gently on the shoulder and headed out into the corridor.

CJ didn’t usually smile at Republicans but she couldn’t help making an exception in his case. “Mr. Taylor, I’m CJ Cregg of the…”

“I know who you are, Ms Cregg,” he smiled in amusement. “Despite being a candidate for Congress, I do take the occasional interest in politics.”

“I just wanted to thank you for…”

He held up a hand. “You don’t need to say it. The important thing is we got Mr. Seaborn back where he can no doubt continue to fritter away his undoubted talent in making policies that give power to the government at the expense of the individual sound lofty and inspiring.”

“Yes, that’s pretty much what we’re hoping, sir.” Impulsively, CJ leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you so very much for everything you did to help find Sam.”

Touched, he bowed his head to her. “You’re welcome.”

And then she was free to speed into Sam’s room and throw her arms around his neck and give him a resounding kiss on the cheek. “Sam-Sam, the sunshine man, my little Schmutzy Pants, I am so glad to see you.”

She had thought he would object to the ‘schmutzy pants’ comment, but he was too busy hugging her right back with such intensity that she was the one who was breathless. He felt warm and uncharacteristically bony with that weight he’d lost. She gently disentangled herself and then got a good look at his bruised face, gave a cry of dismay and pulled him in for another hug. “My poor little Sam.”

“CJ, that’s two ‘little’s in two sentences…” he murmured a bit indistinctly, his mouth somewhere around her shoulder. “You’re stepping all over my fragile masculine ego with hobnailed boots right now.”

She sat back and combed his hair back from his forehead with her fingers. “I don’t care about your fragile masculine ego, Sam. No woman does. We just think you should get over it and be more like us. But back to business – from now on you don’t go anywhere by yourself after dark, is that clear? Or during daylight hours.”

“I don’t think that’s entirely fair, just, or reasonable.” He patted ineffectually at his hair to try to undo whatever she had just done to it.

“Tough.”

Evidently seeing that she was in implacable mode, Sam tried again: “You let Josh go out by himself after he got shot.”

“That was different. We were all there when Josh got shot. I would have been shot too if you hadn’t pushed me out of the way, proving that getting shot can happen to anyone and has no possible blame or censure attached to it. Unlike getting kidnapped, which immediately proves some kind of reckless negligence that I haven’t entirely sorted out in my own mind yet, but which I nevertheless know exists.”

“Do you have Carol researching ways that you can blame me for being kidnapped?”

“No, Josh already has Donna working on that. I don’t think her heart’s in it, though, she seems to think we ought to be nice to you or something just because you went through a hideous ordeal. People from Wisconsin, eh?”

“Salt of the earth and I’ve always said so,” Sam returned with spirit. 

CJ reached into her purse for a comb and began to gaze at his hair critically. “We probably need to get you on TV soon. Once we’ve arranged for you to get a hair cut and when you’re looking a little less bruised, pasty, and sick, and – you know – as if you’re carrying one of those TV movie plagues that wipe out everyone except a handful of B list actors.”

“I don’t think I want to go on TV with or without my tubercular-sounding cough.”

“You used to be fine about it.”

“Well, that was because when I was going on TV before it was to discuss issues, not to be paraded up and down like some kind of thing that…gets paraded thing.”

CJ began to comb his hair. “Well, I wasn’t going to tell you, Sam, but the truth is we always sent you because you’re just so gosh-darned…you know, and it could make housewives vote Democrat if they saw your big blue eyes and chiseled jawline.”

He looked at her in shocked betrayal. “That’s a lie,” he said breathlessly.

She grinned at him. “Yes. But you were worried for a minute there.”

He slumped down in his pillows. “I think I feel a sulk coming on.”

She shook her head. “The trouble is that when you pout like that you just look…”

“Don’t say it!”

“You just look…adorable.”

Sam glared at her through narrowed eyes. “Kittens, fluffy chicks, and babies are ‘adorable’. I am a grown person who has had sex and can parallel park a car that doesn’t even possess power steering.”

“I don’t think so. Not without power steering. Not unless there was enough room to park a ten wheeler and no oncoming traffic.”

“Okay, maybe I overreached a little there, but I have definitely had sex.”

CJ nodded. “Occasionally with high-priced call girls, I know. I distinctly remember yelling at you about it. This prevents you from looking adorable when you pout, how, exactly?”

Sam looked yet more pouty and adorable. “I just know that it does.” There was a pause before he said: “You know what would cheer me right up right now?”

“Does it involve me, Carol, and a couch?”

He grimaced. “Well, yes…”

“Give me chocolate and I might pretend I didn’t hear that.”

Sighing in resignation, Sam pushed across a half-empty box of Godivas. “I didn’t eat all of these. Toby and Josh ate a lot of them, even though they said that they didn’t eat chocolate because they weren’t girls.”

“You’ve been in here, vegging out in front of chick flicks and eating all the soft centers, haven’t you?” CJ observed conversationally as she hunted for the key lime truffles.

Sam looked evasive. “I’m not sure that they would count as ‘chick flicks’?”

“Did anyone get a terminal illness? Did any children have to be rehomed?”

“There may possibly have been some rehoming of soon-to-be-orphaned children involved.”

CJ shook her head. “I don’t believe it. You, Toby and Josh have been sitting here, passing around the Kleenex and the Godivas while sniffling over ‘Who Will Love My Children?’”

“I’m wired up to a lot of machinery. It wasn’t actually possible for me to move. And we were trying to find sports to watch. And we’re all still in a very stressed and emotional state and naturally more inclined to respond to emotionally manipulative imagery and that music they play with the violins. Also, there were soon-to-be-orphaned children.”

“You’re all girls,” CJ told him, through a mouthful of chocolate.

“I think that has actually already been established,” Sam admitted with a sigh. “So, what’s happening with the…?”

“No.” CJ gave him a stern look. “I’m under strict instructions from Leo and Mrs. Bartlet. No one is allowed to talk to you about policy.”

“But, I’m just sitting here all day, I could…”

“No. Absolutely not. Sam, Toby has been told in no uncertain terms that if he even thinks about giving you a speech to polish, there will be bloodshed. You have to rest and recuperate.”

“Writing speeches is how I rest and recuperate. When I can’t go sailing or do anything, you know…fun.”

“We can play poker with you, for money. We can mock you, should we feel so inclined. We can also eat your chocolates, grapes or any other foodstuffs you may have hanging around, but we are absolutely not allowed to put you to work.”

“You’re scared of the First Lady.”

“More to the point my boss is scared of the First Lady and he’s the guy giving me orders.”

“I saw in the paper that there is talk of Harrison trying to attach an amendment to the…”

CJ made zipping motions across her mouth and Sam rolled his eyes.

“If I can’t talk about this stuff I’m just going to get frustrated and…sick, really, really sick, and it’ll be all your fault.” 

CJ sighed. “If you want, I could get you transferred to a different hospital. In Washington. And then we could all visit you a lot more and there could be more mockery, and eating of your foodstuffs.”

“Well, I’ll be out soon anyway…” Sam’s voice trailed off as he saw her expression. “How long do I have to stay in the hospital?”

“Until you finish the antibiotics for your pneumonia.”

“Ten days!” Sam’s eyes looked like saucers in his face. “You can’t be serious?”

“Sam, I know this must come as news to you, but pneumonia is actually a serious illness, people die from it. And, oddly enough, given that you were kept in a stinking cold cellar in eighteen inches of dirty water, given no food or water, lost two pints of blood from a bullet wound, and were already suffering from borderline hypothermia, are now still in the process of being re-hydrated, are on morphine, and have an infection in your lungs that I can hear in the corridor, the hospital doesn’t feel comfortable about patting you on the head and sending you home with an aspirin. So, yes, you have to stay under the care of qualified medical practitioners for another ten days, preferably without whining about it.”

“Please let them transfer me to Washington.” Sam gazed up at her pleadingly. “And let me have a notebook and a pen.”

“I can get you a pack of cards and any books you want to read. The complete works of Dickens if you’d like.”

“I want to read a spiral bound notebook, lined if possible.”

“How about those talking books? I can bring you in a CD player.”

Sam was implacable. “Spiral bound notebook, please. I’ll need a pen to read it with, preferably one with black ink.”

CJ sighed. “You have to hide it if Doctor Bartlet visits you – which she will.”

“I promise.” 

She leaned across to kiss his forehead. “You scared me so badly. Don’t ever do that again.”

“I promise,” he said.

“Because you need to run to the gas station next time. If a car pulls up, don’t assume it’s someone asking for directions, assume that it’s white supremacists with really big guns and run away. Okay?”

“Okay.”

CJ sighed. “You’re going to lean in the window and give them directions, aren’t you?”

Sam grimaced. “Probably.” There was a pause before he said: “That whole joke about the chain and the padlock and having to live in Toby’s office. It’s…it is a joke, right?”

CJ looked impassive. “Oh yeah.”

“Because you wouldn’t actually do that to me, would you?”

“Gosh, no. Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Sam gave her a look of outrage. “You’re trying to lure me into the White House on false pretenses so you can keep me prisoner!”

“It would be for your own good,” she assured him. “And it’s only for a few months while Toby and Josh’s nervous systems return to normal. And think of all the fun we can have – like throwing you food and seeing if you can catch it in your mouth.”

“If I’m chained to Toby’s couch then you and Carol had better be making out on it, that’s all I’m saying on the subject. Except that it would be wrong of you to be an accessory to an act of unlawful imprisonment, and it would be bad for the White House and the President, and I also think that the House of Representatives would jeer and point. And I would tell my mother and she would scold Josh and Toby – and you too, if you were a party to it – and she can actually be quite shrill.”

“Sorry to be the one to break it to you, bucko, but your mother thinks it’s a great idea. She offered to chip in on the cost of the chain. Even Donna has come round to thinking it’s not such a bad idea since we talked up the safety first angle. Charlie’s the only one who’s still not completely convinced and I think we’ll have him on board by the end of the week.”

“Debbie wouldn’t let you. I have faith in Debbie.”

“Debbie’s already knitting you a nice sweater out of some of her leftover alpaca wool in case there’s a draught in Toby’s office.”

“I know that Margaret and Ginger would never…”

“Already baking cookies. They’re looking forward to getting a chance to feed you up. Apparently your healthy diet was driving everyone nuts, not just me.”

“You have no possible justification for blaming me for the fact that I was kidnapped. It’s unjust and unfair and…”

“And we’re doing it anyway.” CJ grabbed him by the front of his gown and yanked him forward. “You scared the living crap out of us, Sam. And here from here on you’re grounded until further notice. Perhaps when you’ve convinced us that you’re safe to be let out without a keeper we may consider it. In the future we may even permit you to move more than five miles away from Washington. Until that day you can consider yourself under house arrest.” 

“That’s not only completely unreasonable but also completely unenforceable, as well.”

“You go right on thinking that, Spanky.”

Sam looked suitably crushed. “Please may I have a notebook, CJ? I have never been without a notebook for this long before and I think I may be going into withdrawal. I’m experiencing tremors and I think I may be starting to hallucinate evenly spaced lines.”

She rose to her feet. “I will bring you a notebook.”

“And a pen, please.”

“And a pen. But – and this is a huge ‘but’ – if you try to write a speech, and even if you manage to write a speech while still on morphine, and smuggle it to Toby through some nefarious underground hospital barter system, everyone will recognize the passages that you wrote, and there will be yelling.”

“I’m going to get yelled at anyway as soon as I withdraw my nomination.”

“Anyone gets to yell at you about that over my dead body,” CJ said flatly. 

He lit up. “So, you agree with me?”

“No, of course, I don’t. It’s the Quixotic impulse of a hopeless idealist. It’s bad for the Party. It’s bad for the President. And it’s going to be the kiss of death to your political career. You should grab those sympathy votes and run like hell for Congress. But – and this is an even bigger ‘but’ than the other one – no one, and I mean _no one_ , who isn’t your mother, the President, the First Lady, Leo, Josh, Toby, Donna, Charlie, Debbie, or myself gets to yell at you right now. They absolutely don’t.”

She liked his smile. She liked it when he didn’t get something straight away and then he did, and he smiled like he couldn’t even help himself, and it went straight to that touched look in his ridiculously blue eyes. Pausing by the door, she gazed at him for a moment, still drinking him in. Sam Seaborn. Alive. Alive. Oh.

“I think I would have liked you as a sister,” he said, as if he had never considered the idea until now but was now giving it a great deal of thought. “I think there would have been downsides. I think there may have been some pinching and hair pulling and possibly some verbal and physical abuse, but I also think I would have liked it, on the whole, really a lot.”

“I think you would, too.” CJ smiled at him. “And I can tell you – those guys at your fancy-shmancy school who used to beat you up every recess? They might have done it to you once. They would absolutely not have done it twice.” And then she was walking along the corridor with the biggest smile on her face as she pulled out her cell-phone and began to make the call to Leo to arrange for Sam to be transferred to the nearest hospital to the White House for the urgent and important reason that they just all really needed him close by.

***

Tracy had paid him a visit to say goodbye. He’d looked up at the sound of her tentative knock on the door and he’d had the shock of realizing that he recognized her more from the news reports about his continuing recovery than from their real life encounter in that dark cellar or their confused reunion in the hospital when they had both been too full of morphine to make a great deal of sense. This was really the first time they had seen each other by daylight and not through a haze of drugs.

“Hey…” she said awkwardly.

Sam took her in, the way her arm was in a sling, the cut on her forehead, but also the way she was out of that hospital gown now and wearing normal clothes, and, unlike him, was allowed to go home on account of not having pneumonia. The way she wasn’t dead. He grinned at her. “Hey, yourself.”

She came forward and sat by his bed. “They said I could see you before they…took you away.”

“They’re just transferring me to Washington, not hauling me off to the cuckoo’s nest.”

“Don’t be so sure. Your friends are all crazy. They’re probably going to lock you up in the basement of the White House and never let you out.”

Sam considered the point. “It would in all probability be the Steam Pipe Trunk Distribution room. I wonder if my Gilbert & Sullivan posters are still up.” He flapped his own sling at her. “Hey, we have matching slings.”

“Perhaps we can start a fashion.” She craned her neck to look at the information at the end of his bed. “I told you that you had pneumonia.”

“No one likes a smartass, Tracy, trust me, I know.”

Tracy gave him a pitying look. “Other kids used to stick your head down the pan and give you a swirly, didn’t they?”

“No,” he returned with dignity. “I’ll have you know that I was very popular.”

She snorted. “I’m so not going there.” As he blinked at her in confusion, she bit her lip. “You really aren’t safe to be let out without a keeper, are you?”

“Would this be a good moment to point out that you were just as kidnapped as I was?” He met her gaze and saw her remembering it too, the cellar, and the fear, and the bullets, and the pain, and the shock of the impact and then the cold as the blood flowed out of you much too fast. “It’s a miracle you’re not dead. I thought I’d got you killed.”

She sat down on the bed next to him. “Yeah, well, you didn’t. You saved my life. And if it comes to that, I thought _I’d_ got _you_ killed.”

“Well, you didn’t.” He reached out awkwardly with his right hand to take hold of hers. “You saved my life too.”

“I did so many things wrong.” 

As she tried to pull her hand away, he tightened his grip on it. “And you think I didn’t? I should have waited until it was dark.”

“And what if they’d come in the second it was dark? Then you’d be kicking yourself for having waited.”

“You could have been killed.”

“But I wasn’t.”

“I should never have let you go up there alone. I should have tried harder to get free and gone with you. I should have…”

Tracy sat back. “Okay, very clever. I get it. Everyone goes over it and over it and wonders what they should have done differently, but that doesn’t alter the fact that some of the things I did were dumb.”

“And the fact that some of the things we did were dumb doesn’t alter the fact that we’re both still alive as a consequence of the choices that we made and the actions we carried out, and that if we had acted differently there is no guarantee that one or both of us might not be dead now.”

Tracy gazed at him for a moment, not pulling her hand out of his and then sighed. “You know, you look really crappy with those bruises and everything.”

“And may I take this opportunity to point out that you can’t go to your Junior Prom with your arm in a sling.”

“Says you. Because it’s a few weeks away still and by then my arm will be out of the sling and I’m going.”

“Do you have a date?” Sam asked.

She removed her fingers from his. “None of your business.”

“Well, if you don’t have a date I don’t think it’s fair of you to blame me. I don’t think that it’s your public association with me that will be ruining your social life, and I just want to make that clear from the outset.”

“It’s certainly not going to _help_ my social life. How stupid do you think it makes me look that I got kidnapped the same way as some ditzy politician who went to Princeton and doesn’t even have the sense to run away when a bunch of neo-Nazis stop their car right next to him?”

“So, how were you kidnapped?” Sam challenged.

There was a pause while Tracy was clearly looking around for an excuse. She settled on a lofty: “I had my mind on higher things.”

“You were daydreaming about Prom dresses.”

“I’m a teenager, what’s your excuse?”

Sam made like a goldfish for a moment before triumphantly insisting: “I was thinking about policy.”

“You were thinking about supper. You couldn’t decide if you wanted The Kung Pao Chicken or Moo Goo Gai Pien.”

“Actually, it was the Moo Shu Vegetables or Szechuan Shrimp, and have you been talking to my friends?”

Tracy said gently: “I’m glad you’re not dead.”

“I’m glad I’m not dead, too.” He held her gaze. “I thought they’d killed you. I heard the gunshots, I thought…”

“But they didn’t. We’re both alive and they’re all dead and I think we must have done something right.” Tracy spoke with confidence but her eyes sought reassurance, from a grown up to someone who still really wasn’t, even if she had been forced to assume that mantle for a while.

“Yeah, I’d say that was a given,” Sam nodded. “Thanks for saving my life, by the way. I’m glad you did that, rather than, I don’t know, going shopping or, say – bleeding to death by the side of the road.”

“Yeah, me too. Thank you for saving mine as well. I’m not saying I’m going to always be grateful, maybe I really won’t be if my SAT scores suck, but at the moment…” She snatched a breath. “At the moment, I’m glad not to be dead.”

“Are you going to come and see me in Washington?”

She snorted again. “Are you kidding? I’m not going to a place where it snows.”

“On some maps Washington DC is actually much closer to Florida than it is to Massachusetts.”

“Which maps?” she demanded cynically.

“Well, inaccurate ones, obviously. But we’re really not as cold as say – Maine, or most of Canada – a country where we are led to believe that many people live out useful and productive lives – although I’m willing to concede that could just be propaganda. Also there are sweaters. You’re familiar with the knitwear of Tommy Hilfiger?”

“Didn’t he go on Oprah and say…?”

“That’s an urban myth,” Sam assured her. “And if you came to Washington I have it on good authority that Donna and CJ will take you shopping for a prom dress, which, frankly, would be my idea of hell on earth, but I am given to understand that for teenage girls it’s a less horrifying prospect.”

“I think you’d look good in a prom dress,” Tracy assured him.

“I think having an older sister may possibly be of some use and comfort but I am canceling any outstanding orders I may have placed in a moment of weakness for a younger sibling, of any gender, but especially a sister.”

“If you’d had a sister growing up you wouldn’t talk the way you do and you would know how to get girls,” Tracy assured him.

“What makes you think I don’t know how to ‘get’ girls?” Sam countered, stung.

Tracy looked abruptly bashful. Coughing quickly, she said, “No reason.”

Sam regarded her for a moment while she squirmed uneasily. “You Googled me.”

“I never laid a finger on you.”

“You know what I mean.” He gave her a very level look. “So…?”

“So, I Googled you. Are you going to tell me that’s an invasion of your privacy?”

“I think it probably was.”

“I think everything I read was in the public domain, and anyway, it’s nothing important. Lots of people aren’t married at your age.”

Sam had so many alarm bells going off in his head that he wondered why he wasn’t deafened by them. “It didn’t happen to mention…? No, it doesn’t matter. I just wanted to know if you’d read some… Because there are some things that aren’t how they might appear to be, and if you _had_ read them, then, in my defense, I would just like to make it clear that at the time when I spent the night with Laurie I actually had no way of knowing that she was a…” He realized there was no way to end that sentence that was in any way appropriate to the age of the person with whom he was conversing.

Tracy grimaced sympathetically. “A hooker?” 

“It was not at the time of our first meeting known to me that Laurie was a high-priced call girl and I did not at any point solicit her for…” Sam broke off. “I don’t think I’m allowed to talk to you about things like this on account of you being…not over eighteen. And how much did you actually read?”

“Hardly anything,” Tracy assured him in a way that was not remotely convincing. His face must have revealed his cynicism as she looked uncomfortable. “Nothing that makes _me_ think any less of you. I think it’s kind of sweet that people call you the ‘White House Pin Up Boy’.”

“What?” Sam looked at her, aghast. “It says that? It actually says that?”

“And lots of people have broken engagements. And get fired from their jobs.” It didn’t help at all that she was so obviously trying to make him feel better.

“I wasn’t fired,” he protested. “I left Gage Witney of my own volition.”

“Did you really get up in the middle of a meeting and run off with Josh Lyman?”

“No, I…” Sam thought back to that day. “I would call that a very misleading interpretation of events.”

“So, it didn’t happen?” Tracy nodded. “I know half the stuff on the Internet is just made up.”

“Well, technically speaking, it did actually _happen_ but not in the way they’re implying.”

“It’s really LemonLyman dot com that has most of the threads about you and Mr. Lyman and how…” She turned the end of her sentence into a cough and then gave him a reassuring smile. “You don’t really need to know any of that stuff. Or any of the things it says on there. It’s actually a very amateurish sort of forum. And seriously over-moderated. White House Gossip dot org is much better. Although you probably shouldn’t read that one either.” In a hasty change of subject she said: “Are you going to be billing me for saving your life, by the way? As you’re a lawyer.”

“No, although I may be suing you at some later date, just because I can. What else did it say about me?” Sam demanded.

“You talk too much.” Tracy smiled at him. “And you’re okay.”

“It says that on Google?”

“Yeah, only a girl has to read a whole bunch of your speeches first, but yeah, that’s pretty much what it says. It says you’re okay. It says it’s probably better for the world than not that you’re alive and not getting laid any time soon rather than dead in a stinking cellar with a bullet in your head.”

“You know, as a professional speech-writer, I would just like to point out how much more heart-warming that last comment would have been without the ‘not getting laid any time soon’ section.”

Tracy bit her lip to stop a grin. “I think that was what made it myself.”

“When I was at school, no one wanted to date the smart girls. I’m just letting you know that as a favor.”

“Yeah, because the nerds who wear glasses and always put their hand up to answer all the questions, they’re just beating the girls off with a stick at my school.”

“I was not a nerd.”

“You were President of the Gilbert & Sullivan Society _and_ a member of the chess club. You were also a member of the Astronomy Society, the Debating Society, the Guys Who Never Get Laid For Social Reform Society – ”

“That was not what we were called,” Sam insisted. “We were the Students for Progressive Education and Action, and I only joined the chess club because a girl I liked was a member too.”

“Bet she dated another girl before she dated you.”

“Actually she did, but there is no possible way that you could have deduced that, meaning it was just a lucky guess and therefore shouldn’t count in this debate.”

“Have you ever looked at the Princeton website? Everyone on it wears corduroy and has glasses. Didn’t you ever look around at the other students and at least wonder if you weren’t a total dweeb?”

“No, I did not,” Sam retorted, although in a way that he feared probably betrayed that if he hadn’t wondered about it then he was certainly wondering about it now. 

Tracy straightened his coverlet for him. “Is Charles Young still dating the President’s daughter?”

“No, I think they split up. Why, were you…?” Sam broke off. “You like Charlie?”

Tracy shrugged. “He just seems more sensible than…all of the rest of you put together.”

“Well, he is,” Sam conceded. “But, he’s… Well, he’s… I’m trying to think of any fault Charlie has and basically I’ve got nothing except that he’s older than you and lives in Washington, where it does occasionally snow.”

“If I was to come to Washington to see you, is there a chance I might get to see him too?”

“Most people ask for a trip to the White House for a chance to shake the hand of the President.”

Tracy just looked at him and Sam shrugged. “But flying to Washington because there’s a boy you like the look is a valid lifestyle choice, too. Although I do think I get to reserve the right to possibly tell your brother, who will definitely tease you.”

Tracy narrowed her eyes. “Tell Charles Young that I like the look of him and I will smother you with a pillow and say you had a relapse, and that goes double for you telling Eli.”

“You’d smother me twice? Because, wouldn’t the second time technically be redundant as you’d effectively be smothering a…?” As Tracy snatched up a pillow, Sam held up his hands in a placatory fashion. “I won’t say a word to Charlie or your brother but I do reserve the right to annoy and ridicule you in private.”

Tracy held out her right hand. “Done.”

He grasped her hand in his, gazing at her, this girl who was not dead because of him, and was even perhaps alive because of him, and couldn’t stop it showing in his eyes, how very relieved he was that she was okay. “Done.”

Removing her fingers from his she leaned forward to stroke his hair back from his forehead, a sisterly action, in no way self-conscious despite the twenty-year difference in their ages. Almost to herself, she murmured: “You really need to get a haircut.”

***

Josh could hear the yelling as he stepped out of the elevator. It took him a few more seconds to realize that the yelling was actually coming from Sam’s room and to recognize the voice doing the yelling. He looked at Toby, saw him also comprehend what was going on, and then they both reached out to restrain the other in the same instant.

“You can’t…” Josh gasped.

“I was just going to tell you the same thing,” Toby managed a little breathlessly.

Josh looked at his expression. “You do want to, though?”

“Like you don’t?” Toby countered.

Then they were striding down the corridor towards the sound of Steven Wynn’s roars of rage.

“It’s a _walk over_! It’s a shoe-in! It’s a dead certainty! Seabiscuit was a rank outsider by comparison!” –

“Actually, Steve, I think you’ll find that Seabiscuit _was_ – ”

“Be quiet when I’m talking. Unless you’re groveling for mercy or telling me that you’re going to withdraw that withdrawal of your nomination, don’t make any noise at all, until I finish speaking…”

“I’m sorry that you’re angry but, as I told you on the phone, I don’t want to get into Congress on the coat tails of being kidnapped. I don’t want to get in on a sympathy vote…”

“The Democratic Party you are meant to be supporting doesn’t _care_ how you get into Congress, Seaborn, it just cares that you do!”

Toby and Josh arrived breathlessly at the doorway of Sam’s room to find Steven Wynn stomping up and down in the confined space, throwing his arms into the air, and ranting about the chance that Sam was throwing away, the harm he was doing his party, how he was never going to get another nomination in any district anywhere, ever, and that Steven Wynn was going to personally make sure that he was dismembered very slowly with a wire coat hanger if he didn’t withdraw the withdrawal of his nomination _right now_. 

At close range and in full spate, Wynn was actually rather magnificent. He was also extremely tall, broad shouldered, and menacing. Sitting up in his hospital bed, Sam looked a lot smaller than Josh remembered, and very bruised. Although he was sticking to his guns as far as his argument went, there was something conciliatory in his body language that looked half self-preservation and half sheer muscle memory. 

Josh cleared his throat and said tentatively: “I don’t think you’re actually allowed to talk to Sam like that. I mean, not just because he’s supposed to be your political candidate and you’re supposed to be…respectful and stuff, but because he’s in the hospital…”

“You’re running for Congress, Seaborn,” Wynn ignored Josh to intone ominously, looming over Sam in a way that made him slide an inch further down the bed.

“Have you seen how much I’m ahead in the polls?” Sam said rapidly. “How much campaigning did I do when I was in that cellar? None. So, it has nothing to do with people agreeing with my message or being won over by my rhetoric or…”

Wynn slammed his hands down on the pillow on each side of Sam’s head. “I don’t _care_ why you’re up, I just care that you are. You’re running, do you understand me? You’re running in this damned race and you’re winning or, so help me, I am going to take you out to a very dark, very lonely place, where I will – ”

Sam flinched as Wynn loomed over him. “Steve, if you’d just listen, I’m sure you’ll understand why…”

“A very dark, very lonely place where I swear no one on Earth will be able to hear your screams even though there will be _many_ of those, oh dear, yes….”

“I don’t think you should threaten him like that, or that threatening him like that is in any way legal….” Toby’s voice trailed off a little at the end as Wynn fixed him with a look over his shoulder that would have made even Lionel Tribbey think twice.

Wynn gave Josh and Toby a look of withering contempt. “I know you two just want him back in the White House where he can be your pet lawyer and trained speech monkey, but I am _getting_ him into Congress, and anyone who tries to stop me getting him into Congress is going to turn into one of those awkward puzzles for coroners where they have to fit all the body parts back _in the correct order_!”

Toby looked at Josh. “You could be right about the wet towels thing.”

Josh thought he was definitely right about the wet towels thing; the way Sam’s body was scooting down the bed to get away from Wynn it was definitely expecting its homework to get thrown into a puddle any minute, and was downright flinching in readiness of a Chinese burn.

Despite the way he was now almost horizontal, Sam said with a stubborn determination that was either brave or foolhardy – Josh had not yet decided which: “You can yell all you like, Steve, I’ve made my decision.”

“Well, you can unmake it again or else you can find out what your insides look like when you’re turned inside out.”

“That’s – coercion,” Josh offered feebly.

“This is a cozy chat amongst friends,” Wynn retorted through gritted teeth. “This is a walk on the beach, a stroll in the park. You haven’t seen me angry yet.”

Sam sunk even lower in the bed. “I’m not getting elected because I was kidnapped,” he repeated defiantly, but he looked anxious when Wynn leaned over him all the same.

“You know what your trouble is, Seaborn?” Wynn demanded. “You weren’t beaten up enough in High School. I made a good start with you in middle school and I thought I’d got you back on track at Princeton, but, no, you had those few years where no one was teaching you to _do as you’re damned well told_ and this is the result.”

“Bobby Zane did actually – ” Sam began a little feebly.

“Bobby Zane is a _pussy_!” Wynn snapped back. “And I’m calling him to tell him that the second I make you see the error of your ways.”

“I’m not running…” Sam swallowed nervously.

Josh hurried forward. “And you can’t make him,” he said bravely.

“No.” Toby stood next to him. “You can’t.”

Josh murmured to Toby: “I feel one of us should be adding a ‘so there’ at some point.”

“I feel one of us should be carrying a weapon of some kind,” Toby whispered back. “Or at least wearing protective clothing. Possibly a bullet proof vest…”

Wynn shoved Josh and Toby out of the way. “When I want input from the White House, I’ll ask for it. Which will be never, by the way.” He loomed back over Sam. “Listen to me, Seaborn, you stupid, stubborn little sonofabitch, you are going to…”

“Don’t you _dare_ talk to him like that!”

Josh and Toby both jumped at the furious venom in that voice and turned around to find CJ striding into the room in heels that took her up to Wynn’s height, rage in her eyes and quivering through her long-legged body. She prodded Wynn hard in the chest with her finger, and he did take an automatic step backwards. “Don’t you ever and I mean _ever_ raise your voice to him again, do you hear me?”

Wynn took another step back, trying to bluster: “He’s throwing away his – ”

“And it’s his decision, and Sam is an adult who gets to make his own decisions, and – guess what? – you don’t get to yell at him about it – ever. He decided he wanted to run and you got allocated by the DNC to help him, well, now he’s not running, your services are no longer required, so _back off_ and get the hell out of his hospital room or I’m going to call the First Lady, who, in case you might have forgotten, has a medical degree. That means she knows how to do very, very painful things to you with very, very sharp objects. And don’t think Donna Moss and Amy Gardner and I won’t be holding you down for her, because we most certainly will.”

Wynn blanched a little and took another step backwards. “It’s not just his own career, it’s the best chance the party has of ever winning the California 47th…”

CJ took another step forward, fixing him with a gimlet eye, much in the manner that a mongoose would stare down a snake. “And he nearly died and we don’t care about the California 47th right now. We don’t care about Congress either. So, go away and leave him alone or I swear Very Bad Things will happen to you.”

Wynn backed up towards the door, flashing Sam a last look of exasperation. “You’re a bad Democrat, Seaborn, and ungrateful, and unprofessional and…”

“Out!” CJ ordered imperiously.

Wynn left the room, then hesitated in the corridor and came back in. “I’m glad you’re not dead, you little wash out,” he muttered, apparently more embarrassed at being nice than being intimidated by CJ, and then backed out and hurried off.

CJ turned on Josh and Toby in disbelief. “You were just standing there letting that guy _yell_ at Sam?”

“We were honing our counter-arguments,” Toby returned.

“You were letting him _yell_ at _Sam_?”

“He’s bigger than us,” Josh muttered.

“Also, we were honing,” Toby insisted. “I almost had the perfect answer to his position when you came in and made reasoned debate redundant by your yelling and issuing of threats.”

“Talking of which – ‘Very Bad Things’?” Josh looked at her in disbelief. “That’s the best you could come up with?”

“Did it get rid of him or not?”

Josh had to reluctantly accede that Steven Wynn did indeed appear to have gone, and that he had, it was true, been here and been yelling until her appearance.

“So, shut up then,” CJ suggested. She sat next to Sam’s bedside and felt his forehead anxiously. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, Sam,” Josh smirked. “Are you okay or did the Bad Man upset you?”

CJ just looked at Josh over her shoulder. “Do you actually want to know how a stiletto feels when it’s rammed up your ass or would you like to go and fetch me some coffee?”

“And I’m on my way to the coffee dispenser, apparently,” Josh murmured.

“And I’m coming with you,” Toby added firmly.

As they escaped from the room, CJ was still feeling Sam’s brow, presumably to see if it was fevered, and adjusting his covers maternally.

Toby looked back at the woman with pride. “She is rather magnificent on occasion.”

Josh grinned. “She really is.” He caught Toby’s arm and held him back. “Wait…”

“For what?”

“To make sure Steve Wynn isn’t still around. We both know CJ would dismember anyone who laid a finger on Sam’s shiny little head. I’m not so sure she’d do it for us, and he may know that too.”

“Good point.” They both waited in the corridor, looking as the second hand of their watches swept around the dial, before tentatively heading in the direction of the coffee machine; safe in the knowledge that while CJ was in Sam’s room he was better protected than by a tigress who considered him one of her cubs. 

***


	2. Chapter 2

Josh had actually felt his blood pressure dropping back to normal once Sam was in Washington DC, where he could be visited every day, and occasionally twice a day, although only once three times in a day, whatever other people might say to the contrary. Toby visited once a day, at the same time. He left the office at six, saw Sam between six-ten and seven, and was back in the office by quarter past seven. Everyone seemed to think that was fine and normal and not neurotic. No one teased Toby about visiting Sam every day. No one teased CJ either. No one had made fun of the flowers that Margaret or Ginger or Carol or Donna had sent. No one had jeered and pointed because CJ had taken Sam more chocolate than he would have been able to eat in a lifetime, or made comments about Leo being paranoid because he liked to drop in once a day, or heckled Mrs Bartlet for going through every single thing that had been done to Sam or given to Sam or was intended to be given to Sam in the future by the doctors of the two hospitals that had treated him. No, they were all absolutely fine. The only person being teased was him, Josh Lyman, who had, as he kept pointing out, known Sam the longest, and was, as he also kept pointing out, entitled to be concerned.

He used ‘concerned’ a lot. He had been concerned when Sam had been taken. He was concerned about his healing process. He was concerned that he should be comfortable and well taken care of and that his lungs should stop wheezing like a pair of bellows and those bruises would fade so that he looked like Sam again.

Sam, after all, had been born perky. Sam habitually looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and full of enthusiasm. Sam was the guy who hardly ever moped or sulked or snarled, but who would be full of optimism and energy when everyone else was slouching depressively through the day. The bruises didn’t go with Josh’s mental image of Sam. He wasn’t meant to look pale and thin and battered. He was supposed to be all vibrant and healthy and at the absolutely perfect weight for his height and still full of ideas even after everyone else was starting to slump.

This Sam wasn’t so much like that. This Sam was still wired up to machinery and so tired he could fall asleep halfway through a sentence. This Sam looked fragile and bruised, and he scared Josh more than he could ever admit aloud. When he sat down by this Sam’s bedside he wanted to just stay there until Sam was Sam again and they could go and play racquetball and Sam could win and Josh could explain to him all the reasons why Josh should have won if Sam had played the strokes the way he _should_ have played them and if there was a Just God in Heaven.

Josh noticed a difference when Sam had other visitors. Then Sam would smile and sit up and make the effort to be as much like the Sam Seaborn they wanted to find as he possibly could be. But when it was just him and Josh then he let himself switch off the façade that took so much out of him, and would be quiet and tired and someone who was as shaken up as you might expect by what had happened to him. Josh wasn’t sure if he was flattered that Sam would be the way he really felt with him or envious that he didn’t get the perky version that sent the other visitors away so relieved and happy that Sam didn’t have any of that pesky PTSD stuff.

“It’s okay, you know,” he said tonight, as soon as the door closed behind Toby. “To let them see that your shoulder still throbs and your ribs still hurt. It’s okay to cough in front of them and admit that you’re tired and you have a headache and that you still hear the gunfire sometimes and when you go to sleep you jolt awake thinking that you’re falling into a cellar filled with cold, dirty water.”

That made it worth it; having to live with the anxiety that the others didn’t, when Sam looked at him with all that weary gratitude because Josh had been there too and knew what it was like and didn’t need the tap-dance or the explanation. Josh reached out and took his hand, looking at the bracelet of bruises still marking it. Sam let him look; didn’t pull his hand away self-consciously and hide it under the blanket, the way he did sometimes when Leo or Abby Bartlet looked too anxiously at those healing wounds. Josh pulled his chair in closer so that Sam could lean against him, literally and figuratively; could doze off with Josh’s warmth and solidity something to which he could trust himself, while Josh read him David Copperfield; their very own filibuster to delay the inevitable nightmares for another hour or so.

“I’d like to say it was worse for me,” Josh observed as he felt Sam slump against him, almost asleep but not quite. “But it was actually worse for Toby.”

“I rather thought it was worse for me,” Sam murmured. “Seeing as how I was the one actually being kidnapped and faced with imminent death.”

“Well, that shows how very wrong you can be,” Josh assured him. “Toby had it worst and do you know why?”

“I’m not doubting even for an instant that you’re going to tell me.” Sam’s eyes were closed and he was resting his head on Josh’s shoulder, which made it okay for Josh to put an arm around him to steady him, and not at all because he still needed the reassurance that Sam was alive and well and warm and breathing.

“Because he could imagine things that you couldn’t and I couldn’t and that no one should have in his head for a week.”

Sam opened his eyes curiously. “How bad?”

Josh grimaced. “Prison movie bad.”

Sam’s eyes widened. “Oh. I never even thought…. Did you think…?”

“Not for an instant. Well, not until he told me. Then I couldn’t think about anything else.” Josh didn’t add that it would probably have made Toby feel a little better if he could have shared that particular anxiety with someone else, but he had kept it to himself, a slow burn of misery.

“I thought they might shoot me in the head,” Sam admitted. “I couldn’t remember enough biology to know if I’d see the blood spray or if I would be dead before it sprayed. I spent quite a long time thinking about that.”

Josh shuddered at his matter-of-factness.

Sam winced. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be morbid.”

“Yes, because God forbid you should dwell on staring into the barrel of a Beretta for five long days and bother someone else with the fact that it may have scared you a little, the prospect of imminent pointless death.”

“Well, quite.” But there was a little smile relaxing the tension lines around his mouth as Sam closed his eyes again, leaning back against Josh in a way that made Josh’s arm go numb and yet at the same time made him feel taken for granted and absolutely necessary. “Poor Toby,” Sam added sleepily.

“The inside of his head is a scary place to be.”

“He knows… that they didn’t…?”

“Oh yes, the doctor told him.”

“Because they really didn’t. It never even occurred to them to…” Sam shrugged without opening his eyes. “Like I told Tracy, I wasn’t their type.”

Josh opened his mouth to point out that Sam being their type had nothing to do with it, and to just check that, if Sam ever should, by some terrible miscarriage of justice or tragic case of mistaken identity, end up in a high security prison, that he did _know_ that if a three hundred pound roommate had a picture of Bo Derek in a wet t-shirt on his wall it didn’t ensure that Sam wouldn’t be his type. But then decided not to go there, as Sam had never even picked up a parking ticket, and almost everyone in the world, including every Justice of the Supreme Court, was a more likely candidate for ending up in a high security prison than Sam. As it was such a remote possibility it was really better that he just continued in blissful ignorance.

 

Toby had forgotten his coat, which was vexing, as it wasn’t very warm for May, and it was a long walk back along the corridors of the hospital, breathing in antiseptic and anxiety. The realization that he had forgotten his coat had also dislodged from the forefront of his mind that perfect sentence he had almost finished honing. Snatching his notebook out of his pocket, he hastily scribbled down what he could still remember, and then strode back towards Sam’s room. 

Sam being in the hospital was starting to feel a little too like something he was comfortable with. He could see the same signs in everyone else. They were winding down from the stress levels from when he had been kidnapped and starting to relax, mostly because he was now in a place of confinement. Wired up to machinery and monitored by doctors. At the thought of allowing Sam to just wander around making his own decisions, Toby found that his stress levels spiked again. Which was absurd, because Sam was an adult and one of the most intelligent people Toby had ever met. He wasn’t even particularly absent-minded. He was conscientious about his health; almost too much so as there were times when a Deputy Speech Writer should – in Toby’s opinion – just let the plaque buster go and eat more pie. He wasn’t the most visually observant person in the world, which was probably directly responsible for the fact that he was rather too inclined to trip over things or fall down. But so far at least his tripping over and falling down tendencies had only manifested themselves in mild bumps, bruises, and the occasional dousing. It was just that everything was different now. Sam wasn’t the guy who occasionally bumped into things but never came to any harm. Sam was the guy who had been kidnapped and could have been killed; who had been shot. 

“…everyone’s going to be a little paranoid for a while, right? You do know that…?”

That was Josh from in Sam’s room; perfectly mirroring Toby’s thoughts. 

“Why?” Sam sounded drowsy and as Toby gently pushed open the door, he saw that Sam was slumped against Josh; which, with the disordered hair and striped cotton pajamas, made him look much too young to be working at the White House. “You were shot. We didn’t all hover around you.”

“Yes, you did,” Josh pointed out. “And you were the worst person of all.”

“I wasn’t…” Sam’s eyelids were fluttering closed.

“You insisted on sleeping on my couch for a month after I came out of the hospital in case I needed anything in the night.”

“That wasn’t paranoid. Making you wear Kevlar pajamas in case snipers tried to get you through the window would have been paranoid, and I don’t think I ever got enough credit for overruling Donna on that.”

Toby cleared his throat. “Left my coat.” He took a pace nearer to the bed, seeing how exhausted Sam looked when he wasn’t pretending to be exactly the same person he had been before people had held a gun to his head and told him they were going to pull the trigger. “You look tired, Sam,” he added.

“Painkillers,” Josh explained. “They take it out of him a little.”

Toby came round to the other side of the bed and took a better look at him, the shadows under his eyes and the bandages and the bruises. Sam could distract the eye from those somehow with the smile and the banter and the eagerness to hear about what was happening at work. “You don’t need to put on a show for us, Sam.” He reached across awkwardly and then patted him lightly on his uninjured arm. “It’s okay to say you feel like crap sometimes.”

Sam tried to focus on him. “Just tired. Painkillers. Also, the nurses are evil and probably drugging me.”

“You don’t think the various beatings you took, the two bullet holes in you, the pneumonia, and the stress could be a factor?”

Sam shook his head although his eyes were closing again. “Definitely the evil nurses. They’re cruel and they mock me.”

Toby looked an enquiry at Josh who sighed. “They won’t let him eat candy and they tell him he looks cute in his pajamas.”

“He does. If Christopher Robin had brown hair and had recently been mugged he’d be a dead ringer for Sam in those jammies.”

Josh shrugged an acknowledgement but Sam didn’t offer a protest, head resting on Josh’s shoulder and eyes definitely closed. Toby sat on the edge of the bed, making it dip towards him in the same way that the mattress was dipping towards Josh. “Sam, are you awake?”

“Yes,” Sam murmured without opening his eyes.

In a low soothing voice, Toby said: “Sam, just so you’re given fair warning, I’m letting you know that we are going to insist that you return to the White House and that you become my deputy speech writer again, and that we don’t give you any more money than we were paying you before, because we’re basically very cheap, and that you will have to stay in the White House probably all the time, unless constantly supervised, and that we may deem it necessary to use restraints sometimes, and will certainly insist that you wear Kevlar pajamas on the rare occasions when we allow you to sleep. Is that understood?”

“Yes…” Sam murmured drowsily.

“And you agree to these conditions…?”

Still slumped against Josh and clearly very much more asleep than awake now, Sam muttered something that could possibly have been ‘yes’.

Toby stood back up. “Okay then. That was a verbal consent given in the presence of a witness. I’ll draw up the paperwork and have him sign himself over to us as an indentured servant right after the next lot of painkillers kick in.” He looked across at Josh. “When we wakes up, tell him he doesn’t have to pretend to be okay when he isn’t. He’s allowed to be scared and to be angry and to be in pain.”

“I don’t think it’s the Sam Seaborn way.”

“Well, just tell him we don’t want him bottling it all up like a big loser, the way you did.”

“You’re all heart,” Josh observed, not without amusement.

Toby picked up his coat and then hesitated in the doorway. “Is he going to be okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t just say it because it’s what you think I want to hear.”

“I’m not. He’s going to be okay. I’m not going to let him not be okay, you’re not going to let him not be okay, neither is CJ, or Leo, or the President of the United States. He’s going to be okay. We’re going to take care of him and he’s going to get over this and he’s going to be okay.”

“And eat pie?”

Josh nodded. “He’s definitely going to eat pie.”

Toby backed up and then nodded his head at the way Josh was sat so that Sam could sleep against him. “You’re going to get a killer crick in your neck and your arm will go numb.”

“I already have and it already is,” Josh assured him.

“Okay, good.” Toby nodded and took his leave, but as he walked along the corridor he realized that that niggling sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop that had been undermining his relief at getting Sam back for days now, had faded. Sam wasn’t okay. He and Josh had both just admitted it; which meant they had acknowledged the problem; which meant they were both on the problem; which meant it would eventually be solved, and then Sam really would be okay, and in the meantime, as Bruno Giannelli had put it when he had called to hear how things were going, Sam was very not even slightly dead.

***

It was strange to be back. In this building. In this office. So strange that, coming as it did on top of the nightmare of his kidnap, that Sam occasionally wondered if the whole thing was a fever dream: the cellar, the girl shopping for her Prom dress, the gunshots, and now this room again, this far too familiar room, and, outside, the murmur of the Bullpen and, next door, the murmur of Toby, and the occasional rhythmic thump of that ball against the wall as Toby tried to think. It didn’t seem unreasonable to assume that it was all unreal.

The difference as the days unfolded was that although he would have given almost anything for the cellar to be a nightmare, he knew he was going to feel a terrible sense of loss if he woke up now and found that this part was just a dream. Despite his general feeling of disconnection; the way he sometimes couldn’t make sense of what people were saying to him even when they stood there, patiently, and repeated themselves in slower and simpler terms; or would find himself jumping violently at every day noises; flinching from things half glimpsed out of the corner of his eye that turned out to be potted plants or lamp stands; despite those and a dozen other weirdnesses encountered every day; he didn’t want being back here in this place with these people to be just a dream.

 

Sam was in with Leo when Lionel Tribbey walked in. Lionel was always tall and loud in a confined space, but Sam hadn’t ever realized quite how tall and how loud the man was or how very confined Leo’s office could feel. He felt an almost overwhelming urge to get down lower, to not make eye contact, as Lionel boomed over his head at Leo, sounding incredibly angry. Sam looked down at the papers he was holding, the position he had written for Leo to look at that dealt with the case Lionel was discussing, and realized that his hand was shaking, the papers fluttering frantically against his thigh like the wings of a trapped bird.

“Your people aren’t ‘lawyers’, Leo. They’re politically ambitious Jacks of No Trades who got a law degree so it would look good on their resumé. I don’t care if they went to Yale or Harvard or Princeton they still don’t know a damned thing about the law…”

The papers were fluttering so frantically now that Sam couldn’t seem to control it, even when he grabbed his arm and tried to hold it still.

“You!”

Sam jumped as Lionel fixed his momentarily terrifying gimlet eye upon him. “Me…?” he squeaked feebly.

“Yes, you, Recording Secretary of the Princeton Gilbert and Sullivan Society. Are you an actual lawyer or a law-degree-but-no-practical-experience-don’t-try-my-patience-pretending-to-be-a-lawyer lawyer?”

“I…” Lionel had always been a little frightening. Sam tried to hold onto that, that he tended to make everyone jump and quake a little, everyone except Leo and the President. Even Toby was a little scared of Lionel. But this was much worse than the usual little prickle of fear up the spine. This was body thrumming, teeth chattering terror. “I’m…”

“Sam was with Gage Witney, Lionel,” Leo said smoothly. “He’s a real lawyer, and stop yelling at him, he wasn’t even here when this was being screwed up.”

“Well, where was he?” Tribbey demanded. “Why wasn’t he here and why wasn’t he using his skills as a ‘real lawyer’ to prevent the White House from constantly giving false testimony to Congressional Committees?”

As Tribbey’s voice grew louder and louder and the man loomed over him from what seemed to be a height of ten feet, Sam thought he really was going to have no choice but to drop to the floor and put his hands over his head. Leo deftly inserted himself between Tribbey and Sam and held up a warning hand.

“Sam was being held at gunpoint in a basement by the Orange County chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, Lionel, remember? And I don’t think he really enjoys being yelled at right now, especially for things that aren’t his fault.”

“Oh.” Tribbey subsided and took a step back, shrinking from ten feet to his usual ordinarily towering height of around six foot seven. “That was you.” He looked Sam up and down. “Well, all right then. If you weren’t here I suppose it couldn’t have been your fault. Although perhaps if you spent more time here and less time being held at gunpoint in basements by racist psychopaths it might be better for everyone. Hmm?”

“Yes,” Sam managed, still feebly. 

“Well, don’t do it again then.” Tribbey swept magnificently towards the door and then paused to glare at Leo. “Don’t let them screw this up for a second time, particularly when I’m going on vacation.” Then he was out of the door and Sam found that his legs were so weak he wasn’t sure they were going to hold him up.

“Why don’t you sit down, Sam.” Leo took him by the arm and helped him to the couch in his office. “Margaret!” As she appeared in the doorway, Leo said, still calmly: “Could you get Sam a glass of water, please, Margaret?” As she produced it, Leo handed it to him and kept a comforting hand on his shoulder. It was his bad shoulder and it hurt when someone touched it, even a gentle touch like Leo’s, but he was still glad of the contact. “Is that for me?” He took the fluttering pages from Sam’s hand and placed it on the desk. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off, Sam? You look a little peaky.”

Sam thought about being at home in an empty apartment, going to sleep and waking up with that heart-stopping jolt of panic. “No, I’m fine. I’m just… I’m just tired.”

“Which is why I think you should go home and catch up on your sleep. Josh can…”

“Josh is in meetings all day. I’d rather be here.” He risked a look up at Leo, pleading rather than stating, because he couldn’t seem to suggest anything these days without wanting to sugar it with a plea, an apology, a squirm of ‘don’t be mad’. 

“Okay, Sam. Whatever you want. Maybe you should go and work in Toby’s office for a while?”

Sam nodded, just relieved he wasn’t being sent home. Still trying to work out how that had happened, that he had gone from being someone who argued his point passionately, to someone who would have no method of preventing himself from obeying if Leo sent him home. As he left he was aware of Leo picking up the phone and as he entered Toby’s office, knocking tentatively before he did so, he was aware of Toby putting down the phone, but it wasn’t until an hour later that he realized Leo had called Toby and that was why Toby was letting him stay in his office, even though Toby hated people being in his office when he was trying to write. And that was why Toby told him to take the couch, and took his meeting with Bickerstaff in Sam’s office while he left Sam drowsing on the couch with Toby’s jacket draped over him and Toby’s throwing ball slipped into his hand as Toby went next door, so that when Sam jolted back into wakefulness from the inevitable nightmare, in between the panic and the gasping for breath, there was the awareness of the ball in his hand, something to grasp tighter, something to anchor him to the here and now.

 

Sam thought he was doing a little better. Not wonderfully well or anything, but a little better than he had been. He was writing – badly, certainly – but he was writing. Each day Toby gave him some work to do and he finished some of it – not very well, usually. Phonecalls were a problem, as they usually demanded that one was firm with the person on the other end of the line and Sam couldn’t seem to manage that right now. Face to face meetings were a problem for the same reason. He had spent two weeks trying to pretend that nothing was wrong while Toby shifted things around to try to accommodate his sudden failures of nerve at the last moment, and uncomplainingly took the meetings he had arranged instead, but he had finally had to tell Toby that there was no point in scheduling any meetings for him right now.

“I’d give away the farm,” Sam winced as he admitted it. 

Toby didn’t make him explain, didn’t make him spell out what a raised voice did to him right now, how he had somehow lost the will to push back when someone pushed, even though that had always been his specialty in the past, to be more resilient in the face of opposition, not unreasonable or aggressive, just stubbornly determined. But he wasn’t that person any more. He was someone who if someone shouted at him got tears in his eyes like he was seven years old again, and would give in at once, do anything just to make the anger not be directed his way any more. That meant Toby was having to handle him with kid gloves and Sam just knew it was making him crazy. Toby needed to yell. It was part of who he was, and he had worked well with Sam in the past because Sam didn’t care that much when he yelled as long as it wasn’t directed at him, and on the few occasions when it was, Sam had no problem with yelling back. Now he was this shrinking violet who had to be protected even from the ordinary characteristics of his closest friends.

“I’ll reschedule. It’s not a problem.” Toby gave him a long level look. “No one expects you to just bounce back from this, Sam. No one except you.”

That was the other thing that made him get tears in his eyes and feel like he was seven years old – people being nice to him. Toby saw him starting to crumple and added quickly: “Just go and write something that doesn’t make me want to kill both of us, preferably about the amendments to the Environmental Protection Package. Try to find a balance between stressing that we’re cracking down on polluters and not alienating big business. We already have the environmental lobby, remember, and the clean up costs going back to the polluter is in the bill. We don’t need to suck up to them or act as if successful businesses are the enemy. We need to make it clear that from now on polluters have to pay for their own clean up but we don’t want to overdo it. Okay?”

Sam nodded and went to work on the speech. He could feel it in him somewhere, the ghost of the old Sam Seaborn because that guy would begin a sentence that was sweeping and strong and full of power but then something in him would make him pull back from the brink.

“The time has come to send a message to those businesses who would destroy the future of not just our children but our children’s children…” He crossed it out and tried again. “We need to punish those who would place short-term profit above long term damage, those who reap the rewards of destroying the irreplaceable, the loss of which…” He stuttered to another halt. “Whose real cost will be borne by future generations and…” He threw that on the floor as well. What he wanted to write was that big businesses who heedlessly polluted because they were too cheap to change their equipment or their methods should have to pay far more than those changes would have cost so that their most economical option would be to do the right thing; that those people who were making money hand over fist killing the planet that everyone, including people who did not buy their product had to live on, should have to suffer the consequences of their greed and stupidity and short-sightedness, and what he also wanted to write was something quiet and still that would make him no enemies anywhere. 

The middle ground was bad prose; oratory that didn’t so much soar as stutter to get airborne. Bland words and clichés and nothing that anyone would ever remember or take note of; or get him for after recess. A speech that wanted to pass through unheard while its writer slipped past unseen. It had dismayed him in the hospital, the way ringing words in his head flinched apologetically onto the page; he had ended up ripping out most of the pages of the notebook CJ had brought him. Far from smuggling out speeches to Toby, he had found it almost impossible to write one stirring sentence.

He handed the page to Toby at six o’clock, painfully aware that it didn’t work, that there was probably not even a sentence the man would be able to use. Toby took it and thanked him gravely, and suggested he went home.

Sam admitted he was waiting for Josh, who was going to drive him home, and Toby said he wouldn’t be long. There was a meeting with Leo. He’d go and hurry him up. Sam should wait in his office. On his couch. Sam immediately sat on the couch and knew he wouldn’t move; knew that both he and Toby knew that he wouldn’t move from the couch upon which he had been told to sit until Toby came back and told him that it was okay to do so. Toby gave him a tentative pat on his good shoulder and then went away. Sam sat on the couch and waited.

 

Leo gave Toby a look of impatience as he arrived. “You’re late.”

“I had to make sure Sam was okay. Now, I’m here.”

“How is he?” Josh asked at once. They had all told Josh he wasn’t to hover. He wasn’t to camp out in Sam’s room, or go in there every five minutes on some pretext, or display his over-anxiety where Sam could see it. To help out, Leo had tried to schedule meetings for Josh that were in town or on the Hill or anywhere but in the White House, or if they were in the White House as far away from the Bullpen as he could manage it so that Sam got at least some breathing room. Josh had been complying, going to his meetings but bugging the hell out of Toby with half-hourly calls to check on Sam’s progress. Calls made, as far as Toby could tell, even in the middle of very important meetings, and calls certainly made to Toby when _he_ was in the middle of very important meetings.

_“Am I my deputy’s keeper?” he had demanded in exasperation after the seventh call while he was still wrestling with the same two paragraphs._

_“Yes,” Josh almost yelled at him down the phone. “While Sam needs care and supervision and I’m not there to do it, you are. Now tell me how he is!”_

“He’s okay.” Toby thought of the speech he’d read on the way over and sighed. “Okay, no, he’s not ‘okay’ but he’s alive and well and physically recovering. I’m still seeing that as an up right now. Anything that doesn’t involve him being kidnapped by sociopaths I’m seeing as an up.”

“This is Sam Seaborn, poster boy for good mental health, and right now I feel as if I need to talk to him in low soothing tones, as one might to an injured animal recently rescued from the wild,” CJ pointed out. “He’s not in any way ‘okay’. He shouldn’t be here, and we all know it. He should be home with someone with him, with all of us with him, if need be, on a rota, and he should be getting some professional help to get over what those people did to him.”

“He says here is where he wants to be,” Josh pointed out.

“Josh, he’s as jumpy as a bug on a griddle. I hate seeing that look in his eyes. He needs a lot more time to get over this before he should be in a place as crazy and stressful as this. He needs some peace and quiet. He needs some time to remember who he is.”

Leo said calmly: “He’s been through a very harrowing experience. We can’t expect him to bounce back from it overnight. He is the one who keeps saying that he’s ready to come back to work. If he thinks it helps him to be here, I think we should try this route to recovery. We’ve all asked him to see a therapist. He doesn’t like the idea. We’re not going to push him. Not yet.”

“How was he with you earlier?” Josh asked. “Was his position paper okay?”

“It was okay.” Leo’s bland assurance wasn’t fooling anyone.

“Something happened?” Josh looked strung tighter than a kite in a high wind.

“Lionel Tribbey came in. He was a little loud. Sam was a little spooked. It was okay. We coped.”

“What happened?” Josh pressed.

“Nothing happened. I told you. Sam was a little spooked, that’s all. He had a glass of water. He was fine.”

Toby sighed. “I asked him to write a speech about the amendments to the environment bill – Sam’s pet subject, a subject from which I also have to rein him back before he gets too carried away. I _always_ have to make him take out the strong stuff and dial it back a little – except today, when I’m going to have to ask him to beef it up. Ask Sam to beef up the language on an _environment_ speech.”

CJ looked at Leo. “That settles it. He needs therapy.”

“Because he did what Toby’s been asking him to do for the past few years and dialed it down?”

“Because he’s scared, Leo,” CJ insisted. “And we all know it. He’s scared to sleep. He’s scared to wake up. And now he’s even scared to write.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Josh insisted. “We all saw the tape the FBI pulled from that place. They held a gun to his head and he told them to sit on it and swivel. He didn’t back down for one instant, not one single instant, when they were trying to make him read that speech. He took everything they threw at him and threw it straight back. He never even flinched.”

“I know.” Toby sighed. “But maybe that’s why he’s scared now. Maybe he keeps thinking about how close he must have come to being dead.”

“He didn’t think of it when he was standing there with a gun held to his head?”

“Maybe he couldn’t let himself then,” Leo put in. “Now there’s time to process it, and that’s what he’s doing, he’s processing it.”

Toby turned to Josh. “We can’t do this for any longer. I’m just supposed to be collecting you. You need to take him home.”

“You should stay with him,” CJ insisted.

“He doesn’t want me to. I ask every night and every night he says he’d rather be alone. What do I say next? ‘Tough, you have to put up with me anyway? You were totally deprived of the ability to make choices or exercise free will for a week so now, as your friend, I insist that you do what I say?’”

“Yes.” CJ didn’t even blink. “Tell him you’re staying. Take him home, stay with him, and don’t let him come into work tomorrow. Stay home with him and tell him you’re both taking some personal time until he stops being scared of his own shadow. He won’t argue. You know he won’t argue.”

“That’s why I can’t say it,” Josh sighed. “If he was usual Sam, normal Sam, gives as good as he gets Sam, I could have a stand up row on his doorstep, but I can’t take advantage of what those people did to my friend to bully him. I just can’t. I have to let him have the right to make his own decisions back again.”

“He’s not sleeping,” CJ pointed out. “He has great big raccoon shadows under his eyes from not getting enough sleep. He came back a month too soon, Josh, and everyone in this room knows it.”

“That’s still his choice,” Josh quietly insisted. “Sam gets to choose. Otherwise, how are we different from kidnappers?”

As Josh headed off, Toby raised his voice to say: “Well, our spelling and punctuation are infinitely superior.”

CJ waited until Josh was out of earshot before demanding of Toby and Leo: “Why are we deferring to Josh on this?”

“Because Josh has known Sam the longest,” Leo explained patiently. 

“And Josh is the other one of us who was shot and traumatized,” Toby added. “And so the most likely of us to know what is helpful behavior from supportive friends, and what isn’t.”

CJ gritted her teeth. “And I suppose you think that adds up to a compelling argument?”

“Pretty much,” Toby returned.

CJ grimaced, conceding. “Yeah, I do too.”

“So, we’re set?” Leo enquired, clearly anxious to get back to matters of state.

“We’ve just agreed to do nothing?” CJ pointed out.

“We’re not doing nothing, we’re monitoring the situation,” Leo returned equably. “When it’s time to act, we’ll act. In the meantime, let’s give Sam a few more days to work through this himself.”

“And if he can’t?” CJ pressed.

“We tyrannically and undemocratically take over the running of his life until we deem him fit to be in charge of it himself. For the moment, let’s take a step back, take a deep breath, and let the guy have some air and some space. And, Toby – rewrite that speech for him, then give it back to him to work on. Maybe reading your words will help him to find his own voice again.”

CJ accompanied Toby out of Leo’s office, murmuring quietly: “I think they stole Sam’s voice. I think it’s back in that cellar. I think what they left him with is the kind of voice with which one cannot traditionally say ‘boo’ to a goose.”

“He’ll be back,” Toby insisted. “Josh came back.”

“They didn’t keep Josh in a cellar for five days before they shot him, Toby. They didn’t beat him every single day just for daring to have an opinion different than theirs. They shot Josh once from a long way away and he didn’t have time to even know what was happening to him until they wheeled him out of surgery, and when he did finally get the time to think about it, it hit him like a ten ton truck. But they held that damned gun to Sam’s head every day. Every day.”

He was surprised that she was crying, and then surprised at his surprise. He handed her a handkerchief without commenting on her running mascara. “We’ll get him back.”

“You say that like you’re certain.”

He held her gaze, wanting to give her some of the comfort he had been too screwed up to give anyone when Sam was kidnapped and possibly dead. “That’s because I am. We got the break, CJ. We were handed the miracle. He should be dead and we all know it. Is it so amazing that Sam has worked it out as well? He’s a smart guy. He knows there were a hundred times a day when they could have blown his brains out. He knows he did absolutely nothing to make them want to keep him alive, and it’s sheer chance that he’s still breathing in and out right now. And he’s having a little trouble dealing. Why wouldn’t he? And I could care less if Sam doesn’t write a speech that’s fit for anything more than lining a rabbit hutch for a month or a year, or however long it takes, because one day he will. And I don’t care how long it takes. I just know he’s alive and they’re dead and we won and they lost and Sam is still here and still breathing and that’s all that matters. To me, here and now, that’s all that counts.”

CJ looked at him for a moment and then pocketed his handkerchief. “I’m keeping this.” She leaned across to kiss him on the forehead. “And you’re a good man and a good friend, and you’re right. We got him back, and he’s going to be okay.”

Toby watched CJ walk off with a new purpose to her stride and waited until she was entirely out of sight before he took out that crumpled piece of paper again, with all Sam’s laborious crossings out, and aborted thoughts, and then that quiet apologetic paragraph at the end that said no one was to blame and the amendments to the environmental bill were good but that didn’t mean businesses were bad and couldn’t they all just be friends? Sighing, he went into his office, spread the piece of paper on the desk and started to type up something that approximated to what the Sam they had lost would have said, and what the Sam they had found was momentarily too frightened to articulate.

***

Sam thought he was doing a little better. As he waved her plane off the runway, he was grateful that Tracy’s visit had gone off without most of the public humiliations he had been expecting. He had managed to have breakfast with her in a restaurant without making too much of an idiot of himself. He had broken a water glass when a car backfired and the waiter had needed to mop at the cloth while giving him pitying looks, but the waiters in that place always tended to give him pitying looks, as if they knew something that he didn’t, had access to medical records recording inoperable tumors, or just knew that he was actually a big loser even if the rest of the world hadn’t caught up yet, so he decided not to let it fluster him too much. He’d only been able to have breakfast with her this morning because Charlie had taken her out for lunch, although he and Donna had been allowed to take her out for dinner and a show the previous evening. Sam hadn’t organized Tracy’s schedule for her whirlwind visit – that had been managed by CJ and Donna. Josh had mentioned the prom dress money that was stolen and Sam had murmured that she liked Charlie, and CJ had run around organizing everything so that Tracy’s itinerary had read something like: 

Monday – Plane arrives 12 noon, be met at airport by Sam and Donna to be driven to hotel for wash and brush up. Lunch and shopping for evening gown with Donna and CJ. _Dinner with Sam and Donna and Josh at 7pm. Show at eight.  
Tuesday – breakfast with Sam. Trip around the White House followed by Meeting with President followed by lunch with Charlie. Back to hotel to change and pack with Donna and Sam. Plane check in 3pm. Departs for LAX 5pm. _

Sam couldn’t remember all the details now but that had been pretty much it, and it had demanded that he got out there and interacted with people in public places and put on at least a show of not being a basket case for Tracy. The dinner had been fun. Josh had been witty and entertaining and charming without being in any way flirtatious. Tracy had gained in confidence to the point where she could ask if this was her and Sam accompanying Josh and Donna or her and Donna accompanying Sam and Josh. Josh had assured her that it was definitely Tracy and Donna accompanying him and Sam, and Tracy had looked triumphantly at a weakly protesting Sam and said that was what it said on the Internet. 

Before Tracy’s arrival, they had deliberated between play, musical, opera, or ballet, and in the end had chosen a musical, as being the least taxing and most enjoyable for a sixteen year old girl. Sam had slept through it, one of those times of utter exhaustion overwhelming him, and woken up in the interval to find everyone applauding and Donna shaking him very gently while whispering his name in his ear, so that he could slide back into consciousness gracefully rather than with an unseemly lurch. He had made reasonably bright conversation throughout the interval while Donna kept an eye on him and supplied him with coffee, and Josh and Tracy argued amicably about the merits – or lack of them – of Shakespeare, Dickens, and other dead writers Tracy didn’t see the point of studying. Sam had slept through the second half, too, and woken up to find he had his head on Josh’s shoulder and that Donna was looking at them dotingly, the way people looked at couples as they shared their first kiss after being pronounced man and wife. He had tried to glare at her but had evidently miscalculated as she just looked more doting and leaned across to adjust his bowtie.

Tracy hadn’t seemed to mind that he’d slept through her evening in Washington D.C. only acknowledging that she knew by saying mischievously “You do know there’s a test later, right?” She had looked pretty exhausted by that point herself and had offered no protest about being taken back to her hotel and seen up to her room by Donna. Josh and Sam had a drink at the bar while feeling conspicuously over-dressed. One drink and Sam was pretty much unconscious again and Josh and Donna had insisted on seeing him home, and into bed, Donna reluctantly agreeing to wait in his living room, while Josh helped peel him out of his clothes and post him under the covers. Sam had been adamant that no, Donna could not help undress him, no, they absolutely could not stay, no, Josh could not send Donna home in the waiting cab and stay himself; he was fine, and would sleep until morning. And, of course, he had woken at 4am in a jolt of panic, hearing that ‘click’ again, the one that kept waking him every damned night, which had to be a window catch that was loose, but which he could never hear when he concentrated on it, only when he was absorbed in something else. He tested every window in the apartment and found them all locked, but didn’t know if he had interrupted someone trying to force his way in and that was the noise that had awoken him, and then lay awake for hours, too tired to read or write, but too awake to sleep.

But despite Sam’s low energy level involvement, Tracy had seemed to have a good time. She had loved the dress that Donna and CJ had helped her to pick, not to mention the other clothes they had insisted on buying for her. He hadn’t asked her about her meeting with the President or her lunch with Charlie but Donna had told him that Tracy had told _her_ that they had both been ‘incredible’. At the airport checkout, Tracy thanked Donna sincerely for how kind she had been, all the time she had given up, all the money she had spent, until Donna shushed her halfway through a sentence with a kiss.

“Hush. We owe you so much more than we can ever pay you back. You saved Sam. You gave us back our friend.”

Donna and Tracy had done some of that crying thing that girls did when they were really happy but moved, and Sam had shuffled his feet in slight embarrassment and wondered if they had got their friend back, really. If they were ever going to get back the person that they had lost or if they were now stuck with his ghostly doppelganger, the Sam Seaborn who broke glasses at car backfires, tried to climb under a table if someone raised his voice to him, and couldn’t write worth a damn. But he said none of that aloud, just smiled and waved when Tracy departed and let Donna take his arm and hug him as they walked back to the taxi. To an observer it would have looked as if they were so close because they were lovers, or because he was being very chivalrous, but the truth was that Donna was holding onto him that tightly because she knew it still made him want to duck and cover to be in an open place or where there were lots of people around. He could tell she was acting although none of the passersby could have done, she talked a little faster than usual and her voice was a half tone higher as she talked about the shopping they had done, and the airport food, and how she and CJ had bought themselves dresses as well, even though she couldn’t really afford it, there was just something about designer labels that baffled all logical thought and put in its place this awful yearning instead.

And then they were at the taxi and getting inside and he was in somewhere that was dark and enclosed and which – bizarrely, given that he had been held captive in somewhere dark and enclosed – felt safe to him. Probably some fetal memory from the womb, he supposed. And Donna was still trying to find things to say to keep him distracted and stop him having a panic attack and he abruptly leaned across and silenced her with a kiss and said: “Thank you.” 

She got tears in her eyes and put her arms around him and they clung to each other in silence for the rest of the taxi ride instead. He could sense how afraid she was still of something happening to him, of people just coming up behind him and forcing him into a car and she being too slow or too weak and not being able to protect him. He thought how screwed up that was that she should feel she had to keep him safe.

“There were secret service men there,” he told her as they pulled up outside the White House. “They were about twenty feet away. I think Leo must have told them to be discreet.”

“There were?” Donna looked at him in shock. “I didn’t see them. I wish I’d seen them.”

“They were trying to give me the impression that you’re all over your paranoia.” He gave her a weak smile and she reached out to straighten the hair she had disordered. 

“Don’t hold your breath on that happening any time soon, Sam,” she told him solemnly.

Tracy had said it was a relief that he had cut his hair, as it had been kind of a mess before. Sam had told her he was glad she still didn’t have a date for the Prom. Tracy had looked triumphant and said actually Richard Wiley had asked her out, so there, and Sam had scoffed at her having a date with a boy called ‘Dick’. It had felt normal, talking to Tracy, except for that siren wail of panic in the back of his head all the time, for every single minute that he was alone with her; she was too much the cellar and the gunfire to him; a part of him smiled and talked and joked and felt more like himself than he had in weeks; another part wanted to wail in terror and hide in a dark corner for the whole of her visit.

Donna hugged him again once they were back in the White House, as if being back in the Bullpen had brought back all those days of waiting to know if he was still alive, and he tried not to cling to her, even though she smelt and felt so comforting. She seemed reluctant to let him go as well, only slowly disentangling herself from him, still straightening his hair and his clothes afterwards, brushing him down while he picked a piece of lint from his suit off her dress. 

As soon as Sam was back in his office, Josh was there, arriving apparently out of nowhere, saying: “Well, that was a very disturbing scene.”

Sam switched on his laptop, relieved that Josh was there; too relieved, that was the trouble. He wanted Josh with him every minute of every day and yet his feelings were a see-saw of relief that he had someone with him that he trusted to protect him, and terror that if the white supremacists came after him again they might shoot Josh for a second time. He could feel how dependent he would become if he let himself; how easily he could get used to having company all the time. He wasn’t yet sleeping very well in an apartment by himself. He was jumpy, and that annoyingly persistent ‘click’ from an as-yet-unidentified window catch always sounded like someone breaking in. He had to check each window six or seven times a night. Had to look out of the windows, too, to see if there was anyone watching him from the street. But sooner or later he would get over it whereas if he once let Josh stay that would be it, he would abdicate all responsibility for keeping him safe to Josh and probably never be able to sleep alone in his own home again.

Now he made the effort necessary to speak normally and not cling. “Donna didn’t tell you? She and I are eloping to the Hamptons.”

Josh shuddered. “Don’t even joke about that.”

“Who says I’m joking?”

“You and Donna can’t do anything like that. It would be incest.”

“Except for the part where we’re not in any way related,” Sam pointed out.

Josh grabbed a chair and sat down next to him. “My sort of younger brother can’t get it on with my sort of younger sister without it being seriously…ugh. Understood?”

“You don’t think of Donna like a sister,” Sam said helpfully. “You never have done.”

“I’m trying it out as a possible label for our relationship.”

“Well, it would only be appropriate in Arkansas. Trust me on this.”

Josh gave him a sideways look. “You’re okay with the sort of younger brother label, though?”

“I don’t know.” Sam started to type. His first draft of the environment speech had been a disaster and Toby had asked him to have ‘another go at it’. He had not a single idea in his head for how to fix it, but he felt it would reassure Josh if he looked as if he did, so he began to type the words to a poem by Margaret Walker he had studied at college. _My roots are deep in Southern life; deeper than John Brown…._ It wasn’t really an appropriate poem for him as he didn’t understand how it felt to be Southern or a woman or black so he didn’t know why it had come into his head, but it had, so he was typing it. He thought that Ainsley might like it; might even understand it better than him. She was Southern and a woman. Or Charlie, who wasn’t Southern or a woman but would at least understand the part about being black. “I’m thinking it over. Toby is already my sort of adopted older brother and he’s a little on the bossy side.”

“That’s probably because he’s your boss.”

“But it could also be because he’s decided to take on the mantel of fraternal responsibility where I’m concerned. And if you do the same, you might start to be bossy, too. Also, it would make you and Toby brothers and you a middle child, and I would then be the youngest of three instead of the oldest of one.”

“Just so you know, the ‘oldest of one’ is an only child. Traditionally a spoiled brat of seismic proportions.”

“Just as middle children are notorious for their psychological problems from not having an easily defined role in the family group.” Sam was now typing: _I am no hothouse bulb to be reared in steam heated flats_ but Josh couldn’t see the keyboard so he didn’t know that, and was now hopefully feeling very reassured by the speed and precision of Sam’s typing. Sam thought this was probably a very silly poem for him to be typing, as he probably _was_ a hothouse bulb _walled in by steel and wood and brick far from the sky_ these days.

“That guy from the OHOB would think the younger brother label for you – coming from me – was only appropriate in Arkansas as well,” Josh said, half-glumly, and half with a darted look at Sam to check his reaction that Sam wasn’t supposed to be aware of.

“Which guy?” Sam paused in his typing.

“The guy… You know... The tall one with the tie.”

“What tie?”

“The one that means he went to somewhere we’re supposed to be impressed by.”

“We went to Harvard and Princeton,” Sam pointed out, resuming his typing. _I want to walk along with sack of seed to drop in fallow ground._ “Other people are supposed to be impressed by us.”

“I think he went to Oxford.”

Sam felt momentarily discomfited and then rallied. “Just because it’s British doesn’t mean it’s better, I think the good people of Boston would testify to that. Not to mention the Declaration of Independence.” _Restless music is in my heart and I am eager to be gone._

“You don’t mind that people think you and me are… you know?”

Sam shrugged. “No.”

Josh grinned. “Think I’m a catch, eh?”

Sam tried not to grin back, knowing he shouldn’t indulge Josh when he was in this mood, that CJ and Donna would scold him later, but enjoying it, just relieved to be having fun again. “Not really.”

“You do. You think I’m a catch. You think it’s a feather in your cap that people think you’re dating me. Donna, Sam thinks I’m handsome.”

“I never said you were handsome.” Sam wanted to keep right on typing but he had hit a memory snag on the last verse of the Margaret Walker poem. He knew the poem so well. Why couldn’t he remember it?

“But you think it.”

Sam couldn’t help grinning now. “Yeah, I think you’re handsome.”

Donna rolled her eyes. “Why are you encouraging him?”

“You’re the one who tells him all the girls like him in that shirt.”

“Only when I’m trying to get him to change his clothes. And it wasn’t this shirt, it was a different shirt.”

Josh looked down at his shirt in confusion. “The girls don’t like me in this shirt?”

“The girls haven’t formed an opinion about you and that shirt, Josh. They are, as yet, undecided on the shirt.”

“Do they think Sam looks handsome in his shirt?”

“Sam looks handsome in anything,” Donna explained helpfully. “Sam would look handsome if you dressed him in a garbage bag and rolled him in dirt. That’s why so many people think your relationship with him isn’t fraternal.”

“You heard the whole sister from Arkansas conversation?” Josh demanded. “Because that was totally not meant for your ears.”

“I hear everything,” Donna explained with a bright smile. “That’s what makes me such an efficient assistant and also what would make me such an efficient blackmailer if I ever gave into the lure of a life of crime.” She transferred a much warmer smile to Sam. “And I’ll elope to the Hamptons with you any time, Sam, just as long as you promise me that you won’t go sailing.”

Sam gave her a look of reproach. “I thought we were going to buy a boat.”

“No, it has to be dry land on account of you not being able to sail a boat without falling overboard.”

“I’m a very good sailor.”

“Yes, for ninety-five percent of the time. It’s the five percent where you fall overboard and nearly drown that would concern me. Think of the children.”

As Donna left, Sam sighed. “I think our elopement is off.”

“I never approved of your elopement anyway.” Josh patted him gently on his shoulder. “Don’t work too late tonight, okay? I’ll be around to pick you up at eight and I expect you to have your coat on and be ready.”

“Pick me up from where?” Sam wondered if he had forgotten somewhere they were meant to be.

“This office.” Josh jabbed a finger in the direction of the floor. “From which you are not to stray except to use the bathroom until I get back.”

“I could drive myself home.” He said it half-heartedly. It was only two hours until eight o’clock. He had been trying to work later and later and if he could have gotten away with it, he would have slept on Toby’s couch, but Josh and Toby had both been incredibly anal about picking him up to drive him to work and then collecting him from his office and driving him home.

“I’m driving you home,” Josh insisted. “I’m driving you home in one hour and forty eight minutes from now, so make sure you’re ready.”

As Josh left, Sam raised his voice to call after him: “I definitely don’t want you as an older brother. You would abuse your spurious authority as an unofficial deputy for our parents and generally be a real pain in the ass.”

Josh stuck his head back around the door. “Toby wouldn’t let you have ice cream, and he’d make you do your homework, and then read it over and make you do it again. I’d let you have way too much ice cream and let you stay up too late watching unsuitable movies. And – if you were very good and cleaned your room – I’d let you borrow my porn collection.”

Sam smiled at him. “Okay, I accept your application to be my surrogate older brother. When do I get the ice cream – or, indeed, the dirty magazines?”

“Later.” Josh’s answering smile was gentle but his eyes still looked concerned. “You okay for a while?”

Sam nodded, immediately feeling not at all okay now that the moment was reached where Josh was going to walk out the door and leave him alone. “I’ll be close by,” Josh’s smile was strained and Sam realized that Josh hated leaving him alone as much as Sam hated being left alone.

“Go away, I have work to do,” he told him as cheerfully as he could.

Josh looked relieved. “Okay. Be ready at eight or I’ll tell mom and dad you tried to elope to the Hamptons.”

And then he was gone, and Sam was alone. He looked at the screen of his laptop. The poem was sitting there with his cursor winking on and off, waiting for him to supply the last verse. He could hear the tap-tap-tapping of Toby’s fingers on the keys of his laptop in the next office. He got up and stood irresolutely in the doorway of Toby’s office, thinking how forbidding Toby looked, and thinking also about the way it would have been if Toby and Josh had been his brothers, and would that mean that they would all be the son of Toby’s father, and therefore the sons of a murderer, or Josh’s father, who had been a wonderful man but was now dead, leaving them fatherless, or Sam’s father, who had been living a double life for twenty-eight years, and had therefore betrayed them. He wondered which was worst, and decided that he didn’t want to give up his father, even though he had betrayed them, but that Toby would not have forgiven him for the betrayal and Josh would have taken it very hard too. Even harder than Sam who had camped out in Toby’s office for the best part of a week wondering when the world was going to land back on its axis again, and if there was anything left of which he could be absolutely certain. Ironic to think that at the time he had consoled himself with the thought of President Bartlet’s decency and how _he_ at least would never lie to his adopted children. Except he had, because people did; they had their own lives of which they were the central player and in which you were a supporting act and…

“Did you want something or are you just standing there to annoy me?”

Toby was trying to sound gruff and impatient but he didn’t quite have it right yet, his eyes were still too full of concern. 

Sam took a hesitant pace into the room, knowing that if he sat down on the couch he would just stay there and another few hours would go by in which Toby couldn’t get as much work done, even though he was doing most of Sam’s work as well, and yet wouldn’t complain about it, because Sam had been kidnapped and had to be treated as if he were made of porcelain.

“That poem by Margaret Walker. I can’t remember the last verse.”

“What poem?”

“The one by Margaret Walker.”

“She wrote a lot of poetry, Sam. Title? First line?”

“Sorrow Home.”

He saw Toby reciting the poem in his head, stumbling over a few lines, murmuring and then: “‘O Southland, sorrow home, melody beating in my bone and blood’.”

Sam remembered then and held up a hand. “I’ve got it. Thanks.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Is this for the environment speech?”

“Not sure yet. Just trying out a few ideas.”

Toby nodded encouragingly. “That’s good. Poetry. We rely too much on speeches by statesmen and the Bible and Shakespeare. Poetry’s good. Good thinking, Sam.”

Sam managed a smile but went back somberly to his room, thinking that Toby would have praised him for successfully finishing a sentence with a period right now. Toby had lowered the bar so far on what he expected from Sam these days that only a limbo dancer could have made his way under it.

Even though it was pointless and had nothing to do with the speech on amendments to the environmental bill, Sam sat down in front of his laptop again and began to type the last verse of the poem, fingers moving swiftly on from the line Toby had supplied to the last line that had previously eluded him. _How long will the Klan of hate, the hounds and the chain gangs keep me from my own?_

He stared at the line for a long time and thought about Tracy as he had tried not to think about her when she was sitting across the table from him in that restaurant; dragged into a car at gunpoint, having to run with a bullet wound in her shoulder, blood spattering on the ground, just because her skin was a darker color than the men who had kidnapped her. And, of course, it would be Charlie who would understand the poem, not Ainsley, because in the end this had nothing to do with being Southern, or a woman; it had everything to do with being black. Because Margaret Walker could have been as Southern and as female as she liked; no one would have made her step off the sidewalk for being either of those things, as long as she had been white as well.

 _We’re nowhere_ , he thought, reaching for a pen and a piece of paper. _We’re still nowhere. After a civil war, and Rosa Parks and Doctor King and the Bill of Rights, we haven’t managed to find a solution to that alchemy of hatred still fermenting violence in people’s minds._

“We’re not nowhere, Sam.”

Sam jolted to his feet in shock as he realized President Bartlet was standing in his office, had evidently been standing there long enough to read over his shoulder, what Sam had typed and what he had written in an untidy scrawl on the pad upon his desk.

The President touched his shoulder gently, easing him back down into the chair. “Sit down, Sam. We’re not nowhere. We’re just not there yet.”

Sam looked up at him, and even though he knew this particular father figure had lied to him, and to all of them, and to the people who had elected him, somehow he was still what Sam looked to for integrity and truth; because idols could be toppled by having feet of clay, but heroes were allowed to be flawed; meant to be, even, because that proved that though they were heroes they were also men. “Do you think we’ll ever get there?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think we couldn’t make it a little further along the road. And neither would anyone else. Politicians are all optimists at heart. We leave the despair to the existentialists.”

Sam felt a pang on behalf of Jean Paul Sartre. “They rejected faith because they thought it represented a devolution of responsibility. And perhaps when you’ve lived through a war in which people were rounded up into gas chambers, you find more merit in rejecting a viewpoint which makes man’s inhumanity to man a failure of God or a failure of faith rather than a failure of men whose responsibility it should have been to make the right choice, and didn’t; who absolutely didn’t make the right choice.”

He expected a rebuke but when he looked up, President Bartlet was smiling at him proudly. “I knew you were still in there, Sam.”

And then, the President of the United States was, bizarrely, ruffling his hair as if Sam was six, before heading back out into the Bullpen, humming as he did so.

***

Sam heard the ‘click’ again just as Charlie walked into his office. Charlie had been doing that a couple of times a day recently, even though, when he thought about it, Sam didn’t remember Charlie ever coming into his office much in the past. Charlie tended to be outside the Oval office and if Sam needed to talk to him about anything, he would find him there. Charlie didn’t tend to wander. It was pretty much his job description to be there to staff the President all the time, and it occurred to Sam that he could only be coming in here a few times a day if the President had given him permission.

“Just came in to see how you were doing,” Charlie said, as he’d also been saying a lot recently.

Sam held up a finger. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“That ‘click’ sound. I thought it was a window catch at home, but now I’m thinking it’s a window catch here that’s been so persistent I’m getting the echo of it at home. You know the way you think you can hear a fly still buzzing even after you’ve helped it out of the window?”

“You help flies out of the window?”

Sam blinked, momentarily derailed. “You don’t?”

“I swat them with a rolled up newspaper. They spread disease.”

“But they just want to get out again.”

Charlie sighed. “I just want to go on record as saying that if you ever have kids, you need to take classes or they are just going to walk all over you.”

“I can be resolute,” Sam protested.

“You can be resolute about policy. I don’t see you being too resolute about bedtimes, glasses of water, or ‘just one more’ story.”

“If it was a school night, I could be resolute.”

Charlie just looked at him. “Okay, you’re asleep in bed, and you have to be up at five am to go through a paper before you come into work, and it’s eleven thirty at night and your four year old comes into your room to tell you there are monsters in his closet and he wants to sleep in your bed. What do you say?”

Sam could answer this one no trouble at all. “I would take him by the hand back to his bed, show him that there was nothing in the closet, fetch him a glass of water if he wanted one, and then put him firmly but kindly back to bed.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“I would.”

“You wouldn’t. Because I forgot to mention that this is some little kid with big eyes, wearing pajamas, and probably with tear tracks running down his angelic little face who is going to be calling you ‘Daddy’.”

Sam needed a moment to fully contemplate that scenario and his likely reaction to it and then grimaced. “Okay, I would probably let him climb into the bed, but that still wouldn’t happen, and you know why?”

“Because you’d be married to a woman who wasn’t as much of a pushover as you are?”

“Exactly.”

“So, you’re relying on Mallory to take the kid back to bed and get him the glass of water?”

“Yes. Although I didn’t say it would be Mallory.”

“Or Ainsley?”

“I didn’t say Ainsley either. As a matter of fact it was only a few days ago that I was arranging to elope with Donna.”

Charlie shook his head. “Donna is a pushover too. You can’t marry each other or your kids would still be in your bed when they were graduating. Well, kid, singular, because you would never have got a chance to make any more. I think Mallory would be a good choice.”

“Mallory, as far as I know, is engaged to a man called Robert Wilkins, who is not a hockey player but is a lawyer of some kind.”

“For someone who hasn’t been around the White House for a while, you know a lot.”

“I like to keep up on current events.”

“Well, you missed the latest update. Mallory and Robert Wilkins broke up.”

“They did?” Sam couldn’t help feeling entirely too pleased about that. “When?”

“When you were kidnapped. Apparently he didn’t show enough concern.”

He smiled. “They broke up over me?”

“Yes.”

Still smiling, he managed: “That’s terrible. That’s really terrible. I’m so sorry about the premature ruination of their relationship, although clearly he wasn’t good enough for her.”

“That’s what Leo said.”

Sam nodded in satisfaction.

“Of course, Leo said you’re not good enough for her either.”

Sam’s face fell. “Leo said that?”

“He’s a _father_ , Sam. If Jesus Christ came courting, he’d want to know why he gave up his work as a carpenter when he had no other clear career prospects in sight and why he’s hanging around with a lot of other unmarried men and a prostitute.”

“I think, under the circumstances, those would actually be reasonable questions.” Sam caught sight of the book of Margaret Walker’s poetry he was now keeping on his desk. At once that line was in his head: _How long will the Klan of hate, the hounds and the chain gangs keep me from my own?_ And he was standing in a basement listening to gunshots, not knowing if Tracy was dead yet, people screaming at him, and the water coming over his head and – He made to shake his head to clear it and then the ‘click’ came again. Unmistakable. “You must have heard that?”

Charlie was, for some reason, now looking at him as if he was particularly tricky chess problem. “Heard what?”

“That ‘click’ sound.”

“I may have done. Why don’t you describe it to me?”

Feeling a little foolish, Sam managed, through use of his tongue against the inside of his top teeth to manage a reasonable approximation of the ‘click’ he kept hearing. Charlie solemnly copied the noise. “That’s the sound you hear? In this office and at home?”

“Yes. It’s been driving me crazy. I keep waking up in the night and thinking I have a window catch open.”

“Okay.” 

“Will you call maintenance? Because if you’re busy I can call maintenance.”

“I’ll make some calls.” Charlie gave him an unnecessarily reassuring smile. “Don’t forget the memo for the Senior Staff meeting. That’s what I came in to say. You know how Debbie is.”

“I only forgot it that one time,” Sam protested.

“I know, Sam. But it was a problem.”

“Debbie let me in without it.”

“That’s why it was a problem. Because the times they forgot she didn’t let Josh in and she didn’t let Toby in, but she waved you right on in without a word, and then there’s the fact that Mrs Landingham used to give you cookies while withholding them from other people… It can cause resentment. So, remember your memo.”

Sam picked it up from his desk. “I have my memo.”

“Good.” Charlie nodded and then left him, alone, nervously awaiting the next sound of that ‘click’ from the faulty window catch, like a man left alone in a room with a hornet, not sure when it was next going to buzz.

 

As he walked to the Senior Staff meeting, Sam twice had to check his watch, because there was no sign of Josh, even though he and Josh always walked to Senior Staff together, and no sign of Toby or CJ. He checked it a third time, and there it was coming up to seven-thirty. When he got to the Oval Office, Debbie was sitting there and Sam approached her cautiously.

“Is my watch wrong? Or is there a meeting happening somewhere else I don’t know about? Or did this meeting get cancelled and…?”

“Go right on in, Sam,” she waved a hand airily. “You’re on time and you’re in the right place.”

“So, where’s everyone else?”

She shrugged. “Clearly, not on time or in the right place, unlike you.”

A little confused, he nevertheless walked into the Oval Office, jumping a little as the door was closed behind him by Charlie. The President smiled at him. “Hey, Sam. How are you doing?”

“I’m doing fine, sir. Where’s everyone else?”

The President waved a hand expansively. “Oh, they’ll be along in a minute. They’re talking to Leo or something. Who can understand the workings of their minds at times? Charlie tells me you’ve been hearing a persistent ‘click’ in your head, which I won’t endeavor to replicate, as when I tried it earlier I looked less than dignified. I think we can both agree that’s not a good way for a President to look, particularly in the Oval Office.”

“No, sir,” Sam responded automatically, now very bewildered. “Um, Mr President, excuse me for asking, but on my way here did I somehow trip and fall down a rabbit hole?”

“No, that was in Orange County, Sam.” The President’s gaze was level and kind. “The hookah-smoking caterpillar gave you the call in California.”

“Are you quoting Grace Slick, sir?”

“I know, CJ already told me – it’s a miracle they gave us people a driver’s license. Sam, that noise you keep hearing, Charlie and I think we know what it is, and I have to say I wish you’d mentioned it a little earlier.”

“It’s a window catch. It’s not closing properly. I didn’t think it was in the White House, I thought it was at home. If I’d known it was here, I would have mentioned it to maintenance before, but Charlie said he was going to call them and so…”

The President kept giving him that level, kindly look which was starting to unnerve him. “Yeah. Can I show you something?” He went to the French doors behind which the secret service men were standing, and opened them, waving the first agent in. “Hey, Bob. Can we do that thing we talked about earlier?”

“Yes, sir.” 

President Bartlet took Sam by the shoulders and turned him to face the terrace. “Okay, Sam, I want you to…”

That was when he heard it, much clearer even than before; that ‘click’ sound. He spun around to find the secret service man holding his revolver and looking at the President.

President Bartlet said gently: “Is that the sound, Sam?”

“Yes, but…” The French doors were open and it didn’t seem at all likely that any window in the Oval Office would have a faulty catch.

The President nodded to the secret service man. “Do it again, Bob.”

The man thumbed back the catch on his revolver and Sam heard it, the identical sound to the one that had been waking him at night.

“It’s the sound of a gun being cocked, Sam,” Charlie said gently. “It’s the sound you heard when they were threatening to kill you and they held the gun to the back of your head.”

As Sam’s knees went a little weak, the President caught him by one arm as Charlie grabbed the other, and between them they helped him over to the couch. “There you go,” the President said gently, before nodding to the secret serviceman. “Thanks for that, Bob.”

Charlie was already putting a glass of water in his hand and Sam took it automatically. The President sat down next to Sam and patted his arm. “How are you doing?”

Sam just looked at him in disbelief. “Apparently not as well as I thought.”

“Well, we can help you fix that.” President Bartlet raised his voice: “Okay, everyone. You can come in now.”

As Toby, CJ, Debbie, and Josh came into the room from Leo’s office – Josh looking at him so anxiously yet trying to give him a reassuring smile – the full weight of what had just happened hit Sam like a punch to the solar plexus.

“It was in my head? It was in my _head_? Right, so you know what this means, then? This means that I am in fact a crazy person. I am not actually a sane person any more. I am someone who hears things that aren’t there and goes around looking for them and can’t find them because of being _a crazy person_.”

“Sam…” Josh gripped his shoulders. “It’s delayed shock. It happens. It’s natural. After a while it stops happening.”

“And then there is pie,” Toby pointed out.

Sam looked at Toby levelly. “I’m not allowed pie until I stop being a crazy person? Because I have to say that actually seems not only harsh but also discriminatory. I don’t remember that being in the President’s election address either. I don’t remember anything about running on a platform of pie being reserved for sane people.”

“I’m just trying to offer some incentives.”

“Well, I’m feeling discriminated against right now.”

Debbie touched Sam on the shoulder. “Sam, would you consider me a sane person?”

Sam grimaced. “Not especially, no. Although I would like to go on record as saying that I have always found your eccentricities both charming and endearing.”

“Have you ever seen me eat pie?”

“Many times, as I recall.”

“Doesn’t that reassure you that the White House is a place where the rights of crazy people are in fact protected, including their inalienable right to eat pie?”

“Actually, it does.”

Josh looked at Toby. “Go and get him pie. Do it now.”

“But I…”

“No, you brought up the pie issue. You need to get him pie.”

President Bartlet drew a long shuddering sigh as Toby left the room. “And at some point presumably one of the people in this room, all of whom, as I recall, graduated magna cum laude from their respective institutions, will suggest calling a therapist for the person with the post traumatic stress disorder?”

Sam blinked. “Is that something you’re actually allowed to have in the Oval Office?”

The President regarded him levelly. “We usually encourage people to have it in the corridor outside.”

“I’m just saying it doesn’t sound like something you’re allowed to have in the Oval office.”

“I said that,” Josh observed. “When I had it. I said exactly that. But apparently you can. As long as you don’t, you know, do it too much or in public.”

“And see a therapist,” the President stressed. “We encourage that, you see, on the grounds that the people who help to run the country might not need to be having nervous breakdowns while they’re doing it. So, when they start having them, we usually like to get them some professional help.”

“And pie.” Toby proffered a plate.

Sam looked at the pie for a moment. “I don’t think I’m allowed to eat pie in the Oval Office.”

President Bartlet seemed to be reaching for his patience. “Well, we’ve already established that you’re not allowed to have post traumatic stress disorder in here and you’re doing that, so I’d say you’re probably okay on the pie issue.”

Leo walked in and took in the situation at a glance. “Sam can’t eat that in here.”

President Bartlet looked disappointed. “I thought he could.”

“No, he needs to go back to his office and Toby and Josh need to go back with him, and they need to sit with him while he eats his pie and we wait for Doctor Keyworth to arrive.”

Charlie looked at his watch. “That will be another twenty-five minutes, sir.”

“How can he get here that fast?” Josh said in confusion.

“Because Charlie told me an hour ago that Sam needed some specialist help, so I sent for Doctor Keyworth,” Leo explained patiently.

CJ raised an eyebrow. “And once again we all have cause to be grateful that Charlie is the smartest guy in the White House – excepting yourself, of course, Mr. President.”

“Don’t think I don’t know that was said ironically. I can tell when I’m being mocked.”

“I’m actually mocking Josh and Toby, sir, as they’re the ones who have been on Sam-sitting duty and didn’t manage to work out what the problem is whereas Charlie did it in a few minutes.”

Josh was still holding Sam’s arm. Sam wasn’t sure if Josh thought he was going to bolt, or if Josh just needed the reassurance, but the hand was there, still gently but firmly encircling his bicep, and he decided that he might as well indulge Josh in his paranoia, as he was apparently now no longer amongst the sane himself. 

“I thought he had a broken window catch. Sam told me he had a broken window catch. He didn’t tell me it might not be a broken window catch, that it was just a noise he kept hearing.”

“Charlie worked it out,” CJ pointed out.

“Well, he had the advantage of…” Josh clearly cast around for some advantage Charlie possessed that he didn’t.

“Being much smarter than you?” CJ suggested helpfully.

“Well…yeah.”

Leo sighed wearily. “Sam, go with Josh and Toby to your office. Eat your pie. Don’t worry about anything, and wait for Doctor Keyworth, okay? You’re not crazy. You’re stressed. And the only person in this room who didn’t expect you to be stressed at this point in your recovery is you.”

Sam got to his feet, Toby taking the pie from him, while Josh kept that paranoid grip upon his arm.

“Give me a minute with Sam first, people.” The President nodded to the others then sighed. “Josh, you can let go of him. He’s not going anywhere. I have secret service agents outside my window and this is a secure room. Sam really is safe in here, trust me.”

Still reluctantly, Josh let go of him, although he paused to straighten Sam’s clothes, and adjust his tie, as if Sam was going to an interview and had to look his best. “I’ll be right outside,” he said sotto voce, just as if the President was the Principal whose office Sam had been sent to.

The President waited until all the doors were closed and then put his hands on Sam’s shoulders. “You know, I never got the chance to tell you how proud of you I am. I was proud of that speech you gave. I was proud of the way you behaved when those people kidnapped you. I was proud of the way you didn’t even think twice about risking your life for that girl. And I’ve been so proud of the way you’ve come back to work. If you’d been my own son, I couldn’t have been more proud, and I mean that, Sam. I mean it literally.”

“Thank you, sir,” Sam whispered, feeling the tears come into his eyes; unable to deal with someone being nice to him right now. 

The President’s smile was very gentle as he tightened his grip on his shoulders. “I know your father’s told you and I know your mother’s told you, how proud they are and how glad they are to have you back in one piece. I just wanted to tell you as well. Leo and Abby and I aged ten years when you were in that place, and we don’t have that many years to throw away like that. So, don’t you ever, and I mean _ever_ , get yourself kidnapped again. But don’t you ever back down either. Nothing that happened to you was your fault, not a thing, and there was nothing you did, no decision you made, that wasn’t the right one. And you _are_ going to get through this, and we’re all going to be with you, but that’s not why you’re going to get through it. Do you know why, Sam?”

He shook his head dumbly and the President smiled at him gently and pulled him in for a hug, whispering in his ear: “Because you’re Sam Seaborn, and you’re too good a man to be defeated by jackals. Because you’re stronger and better than the men who kidnapped you and because, one day, if there is any justice in this world, you’re going to be President of the United States.” The President took a step back and gripped him gently by the shoulders, holding his gaze, letting Sam see that he meant every word. “And I’m reliably informed that’s an office you can only hold if you’re at least technically sane.”

Sam managed a tearful smile. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” His voice quavered a little, and he felt it again, that fierce almost overwhelming pang of love for this man who _did_ say all the things he had so often wished his father would say to him, and who did look at Sam as if he was pleased and proud of him and as if Sam was not in any way a disappointment for not making partner at Gage Witney.

The President clapped him on the shoulder. “Now go and eat pie. And if you could do us all a favor and get a cavity we’d be even more grateful.”

That was a real smile and in that moment Sam felt more like himself than he had done in weeks. He even managed a real smile back as he said: “Yes, Mr. President.”

***

Doctor Stanley Keyworth was intrigued to see Sam Seaborn as a patient. He’d been one of the mostly unseen players in Josh Lyman’s drama before. One of the ones Josh had been pissed at, and, intriguingly, the one he’d felt the worst about being pissed at. Because it wasn’t really Sam’s fault, Josh had said; it was just him, being in a mood. Sam hadn’t done anything wrong. They had talked about other things in later sessions – Josh’s sister and how she had died and how he still heard _Ave Maria_ playing, and how Josh couldn’t survive a nuclear holocaust that his friends didn’t survive as well; he couldn’t leave Sam behind, or Donna. They had given up too much for him.

Stanley had gotten that impression even before Josh spelled it out. Josh was a high maintenance friend sometimes, and never more so than when having post-traumatic stress disorder. Donna and Sam had taken the brunt of it. They were the constants, the uncomplaining allies who put up with him, however unlovely Josh’s behavior might become. Samuel Norman Seaborn had essentially been a bit-part player in the last big drama Stanley had been involved in at this White House; too minor to even merit more than a passing mention when he’d been counselling the President, although mentioned frequently with various degrees of irritation, querulous indignation, and then guilt, by Josh. Now he was going to be center-stage.

His first thought as Sam came into the room was that he looked like hell. He moved gingerly, as if he wasn’t quite sure of the floor yet, or anything, but was dressed neatly, in a good suit, that nevertheless had the unfortunate effect of making him look more like a schoolboy than a speechwriter. Under the bruises, he was surprisingly, unnecessarily, handsome. It felt almost like a waste, someone being that good looking who wasn’t an actor. It felt disproportionate to the needs of a White House speechwriter. It also felt wrong that the bruises could look so good on him; like the punchline of a joke about what the best-dressed victims were wearing this year. Although he’d already read through the notes from Leo McGarry’s phonecall, Stanley knew he was going to have to read them again in a moment, just to double check that Sam had ‘only’ been kidnapped, beaten, starved, and shot.

Stanley caught a glimpse of Josh and Toby Ziegler outside the room as the door was still open; he wondered if they had bodily shoved Sam through the doorway, or had just lent encouragement, soothing words, assurances that Stanley didn’t bite. Sam darted them a look over his shoulder and Stanley saw Toby making shooing motions while Josh gave him a reassuring smile that was nevertheless a little sickly around the edges; like a good parent sending his child off to the first day at school, trying to maintain the façade that he would enjoy it while terrified that someone might be cruel to him; that some harm might befall him that he was not there to prevent.

Given that telling glimpse, Stanley wasn’t surprised that it came up, after a while, after he had coaxed Sam to tell him about the kidnapping, that he did resent it sometimes, the way they treated him like he was their kid brother.

“I get angry with myself.” Sam picked at the thread of his slightly rumpled suit. “I think there may be some part of me that finds it comforting. I think I encourage it in other people sometimes. I don’t always let them know that I’m not just that guy.”

Stanley made a careful note. “What guy?”

“The one who falls off sailboats and believes that everything in the end will be all right.”

“Do you think that’s who you are or who your friends need you to be?”

“I don’t know any more. Sometimes I don’t know when I’m pretending. I think I may be what they think I am. But I don’t think I want to be that guy any more. I think that guy is always going to be so…disappointed with the realities of life. But then, I think, that they need me to be him and maybe I need me to be him as well. I just don’t like what it did to them.”

“What do you mean, Sam?”

“Well, it’s okay, isn’t it? To be the little brother they all pretend they need to take care of, and let them take your hand and lead you around and give you pie, and take you home and put you to bed; it’s okay when you never do anything dangerous and no harm is going to come to you. But after Josh was shot I should have stopped it, because I knew then that danger could find us anyway, but I felt like he needed me to be that guy more than ever because otherwise he had no way of not just feeling like a victim, and his sister was dead, so there was only me and Donna to make him feel that he was still someone who took charge and made decisions and made things better… I don’t know what we were talking about.”

“We were talking about what it did to your friends for you to be kidnapped.”

Sam flinched. “Yes. That’s something I did to them. I let them feel as if they were in some way responsible for me, like a game we were all playing, even though I’m probably fitter than Josh or Toby, if it came right down to it, and there was a fight, I could probably swing a better punch than either of them, and CJ is taller than I am and she likes to do the older sister thing, and that’s fine, and I let her, and I think I liked it, too, but she’s a woman and I’m a man and we both know that if there was danger it would be my duty to protect her, but then I’m in a cellar and I’m shot, and they think they should have kept me safe. That’s what they think, and it’s my fault they think that, because I should have said before. I should have said that I was never really that guy.”

“Perhaps you were that guy, Sam,” Stanley suggested. “Perhaps that is one of the people who you really are. And we can’t show all the different facets of ourselves every moment of every day. We have to trust the people who know us best to remember that they’re only seeing one side and to remember that there are others. And perhaps they do.”

“I feel like I did this to them. I feel like I put that look in their eyes.”

“When Josh Lyman was shot, did you think it was something he did to you?”

Sam looked horrified. “No.”

“But he played an elder brother role in your life, isn’t that what you said? That he and Toby Ziegler act as if they are in some way responsible for you. Didn’t you think that gave them some kind of an obligation to keep themselves safe? How can they protect you? How can they maintain their part of the role paying bargain if they’re not alive and well themselves to take care of you?”

“Josh isn’t so much like an elder brother. Not so much older. More like a twin who’s a few years older. Toby’s more…authoritative. Josh never sends me to my room. To his room, I mean. He doesn’t do that. He just – we do things together. When he was shot it was – I thought I’d lost him, and I couldn’t even think what a world would look like that didn’t have him in it. He’s just been there for so long. But my father did that. He didn’t just take away the present and the future, he took away the past as well. Josh would never do that. He would never be someone else. He would never turn around after I thought I knew who he was and what his role was in my life and just be someone else.”

“Do you think he blames you?” Stanley prompted gently. “For getting kidnapped?”

“Yes.” Sam looked down at his shoes as if they fascinated him. “I know he does. I know he must have been so angry with me. I knew that even when I was in that place. They’re all angry because I walked towards the car. I’m angry about that too. I’m angry that it wasn’t okay to walk towards the car. That I have to change who I am to not be someone who gets kidnapped. I think I should be allowed to go on being me and that not mean that I have to spend a week in a cellar chained to a plow with people who are very much stupider than I am able to hit me any time they feel like it and to be able to take away my life with one movement of their finger.”

And here they were now; at the movement of the finger; the sound of the gun being cocked in preparation for ending this man’s life with a bullet that would break through his skull, bore through the soft tissue of his brain, and then blow out his forehead. That was the reality with which Sam Seaborn was currently wrestling.

“Let’s talk about that anger,” Stanley suggested. “Let’s talk about what is reasonable and unreasonable.”

Sam looked up at him with betrayed blue eyes. “It’s unreasonable of me to be angry?”

“No, it really isn’t,” Stanley assured him quietly. “It’s perfectly reasonable. But there does come a point when you have to decide how much the people who took your freedom from you and gave themselves the power of life and death over you simply by virtue of being the ones with the guns, how much you want them to be controlling your life even after their deaths.”

Sam considered that for a moment and then inclined his head. “Well, that makes sense. But it’s one of those things that seems so much easier when you don’t keep…remembering.”

Seeing him flinch, Stanley continued gently: “It’s inevitable and normal, after an experience like yours, that you will suffer from some recurring flashbacks and anxiety attacks. They will lessen with time. There’s some medication I can prescribe for you and some exercises I can suggest…”

“I’m already on painkillers for my cracked ribs and my cracked collar bone and the hole in my shoulder, and I know the exercises. Josh used to do them.” Sam glanced up at him briefly, a sigh of acknowledgement following. “I know they work.”

“The biggest breakthrough has already been made – once you realized that…”

“I was in fact _insane_ …?”

“That the noise you could hear was in your head, not in the room with you. That’s an important breakthrough, your acknowledgment that you were afraid and that the echoes of that fear – ”

“Of course I was afraid! I was…I was numb with it. Like falling through the ice; that paralysis when the cold water hits you; or when you hit the surface of the sea, and it’s hard, so much harder than you expect, because water looks yielding and gentle, but in fact there’s a lot of surface tension and it punches you, so you breathe out, can’t help letting all the air go out of your body, so that you’re snatching another breath just as you go under, and it’s so cold, and your clothes are so heavy, and you think you’re going under for good…. That’s what it’s like. Like that paralysis of cold. Like everything stops, even your heart, and you can’t feel anything any more. You can’t even feel the fear that’s freezing you.”

“Are you sleeping?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“For how long the pills last. Which is usually about four hours.”

“Is there someone with you?”

“Are you asking about my sex life?” Sam half-challenged, half-joked.

“No. Although you can be sure I would be if I thought it was relevant.”

“I thought Freud considered everything relevant to one’s sex-life?”

“He might have done, but I’m failing to see the connection between your sex-life – or lack of it – and your post traumatic stress disorder from being kidnapped.”

“Why did you immediately assume ‘lack of it’?” Sam looked a little hurt.

“Most men are not overly defensive about having too much sex.”

“I could be a sex addict embarrassed by the frequency with which I change my partners.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“Do you not, in fact, live alone?”

Sam sighed. “Yes.”

“Which means that you’re waking up alone, after these nightmares, presumably in a state of heightened anxiety?”

Sam gave him a very direct look. “Actually in a state of scared…spitless.”

“I really think you should ask a friend to stay with you for a while. You shouldn’t be alone yet. I’m sure that Josh Lyman would…”

“He’s already offered. And Donna. And CJ. And even Toby – which is just weird.”

“Let them draw up a rota. Let them help. Shutting them out isn’t going to help them deal with their own trauma.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose!” Sam shot out loudly. “I didn’t see the guns. I’ve gone over it and over it, and I didn’t see any guns at all until they were all out of the car and standing right in front of me. I thought they had a map. I thought there was a map and they were lost and I thought it would be a chance for me to show some possible constituents that I really did know my way around the neighbourhood; that I wasn’t a carpetbagger. I didn’t see the guns. I didn’t think they looked dangerous. I thought they were students. I thought they were from UCLA.”

“Have you told your friends that you didn’t see the guns…?”

“No. It would just make it worse, wouldn’t it? That I didn’t see them. Toby already thinks I’m a flake because I ended up having to run in the California forty-seventh and he never wanted me to. He came down there and he tried to help, but he really didn’t want me to do it. I don’t think Josh liked it once he knew I wasn’t going to win. Not as much as he had done. It’s okay to say you’re beat before you start, to say you can’t lose because you’re not going to win, but when you’re running, all you want to do is win, and if a dead guy could do it…. It hurt. Losing hurt, ten times – fifty times – more than I expected it to. And I felt as if I let everyone down. Josh said I never had. But that was before. I don’t think he looks at me the same way now. I’m not who I was before. I’m not the brightest and the best that Princeton can offer. I’m not the youngest speechwriter in the White House. I’m not the guy who is going to impress everyone. I’m the guy who lost the election and got himself kidnapped. I don’t think they can look at me the same way any more.”

“You don’t think they can or you don’t think you can?” Stanley pressed.

Sam looked down at his hands. “I don’t think I feel like me. I don’t want to run any more. I don’t want to stick my head above the parapet. I don’t want to raise my voice in case it makes whoever I raise it to angry enough to hit me. I had so much courage when I was in that place. I was so indignant. I never even thought about backing down. And now I’m terrified by the way I behaved. I wouldn’t do it like that now and I can’t even comprehend why I did it like that then. I just want to give in and do as I’m told and be quiet and be good and be no trouble to anyone and not get hit or shot. And I don’t think I can be a speechwriter like that. Or any use to anyone like that. I could have got that girl killed. I could be sitting here right now as someone who got a sixteen year-old girl shot. And those people are dead because of me. They were shot because of me and I don’t even remember what they looked like. I just remember the sound of that gun cocking over and over and over again….”

“You blame yourself for the death of the men who kidnapped you? The men who were aware of the law and the likely measures the FBI would take once they set matters in motion by forcing you into the trunk of their car?”

“I don’t know if they understood the law. They thought they were better than half the world’s population just because of the color of their skin. How intelligent could they possibly be?”

“Did you help to make them stupid in some way that you’re not telling me? Were you their grade school teacher in another life? You can’t take responsibility for the decisions that they made, only the ones that you made. And the ones you made led to yourself and Tracy McAllister both surviving more or less intact.”

“Toby thought they were…that they might be… He thought they were…doing things to me that they didn’t do. I don’t know why he thought that, but he did. He spent a week thinking they were… I didn’t think of it. Josh didn’t either. It wasn’t just me. Now I think about it. I think about it in the middle of the night and I wonder what I would have done. If I would have given in and read the speech if they had threatened to… I keep thinking about how many political prisoners there are out there at the moment that we’re not helping. Ones being tortured for information they probably don’t even possess. I feel as if there is so much wrong with the world and we’re not doing enough to fix it and I feel like a fraud and a failure because I really thought we were making a difference and maybe we’re not doing anything except trying to stay in power.”

“It’s not unusual for someone who has suffered a traumatic experience to blame himself for all the ills of the world, but I can tell you that it’s not the most productive state of mind in which to effect a recovery; it’s also self-indulgent, and a little arrogant, wouldn’t you say? You’re one man. How powerful did you think you were before if you can lay claim to all the ills of the world as somehow being your fault?”

Sam looked relieved and then indignant. “I didn’t mean it like that and we both know that. I just can’t…” He looked at his hands. “I just can’t bear to think of anyone being in pain right now.”

“That’s a common response to being in pain ourselves. Which you are, aren’t you?” Stanley leaned forward a little to catch his eye. “Aren’t you, Sam?”

Sam sighed. “If I take the painkillers during the day I just fall asleep. Toby said he needed me. He said he needed a writer. I want to be useful.”

“You want to be a martyr. Tell me, has anything you’ve written while not on your painkillers been of any merit or use?”

An indignant look flashed his way from vivid blue eyes. “More use than it would have been if written on my painkillers.”

“Has there been even one salvageable line?”

“I’m rusty. I’m feeling my way back into the game.”

“You’re not ready for this game yet, Sam, and do you know why?”

“I have no doubt at all that you’re going to enlighten me.”

Stanley held his gaze as he talked to him; wanting Sam to comprehend this and to start taking that road back to recovery, which he wouldn’t do until he admitted there was still a way for him to go. “It’s because you haven’t finished playing the last one yet and in your heart you know that. You need to finish the previous innings before you can start on the next one. You need to say goodbye to the basement and the gun to the back of your head, and the fear, and the pain, and the frustration at being powerless, and the feeling that you can’t raise your voice – even in oratory – because someone might hurt you if you do.”

***

Sam had always known that Josh was a good friend. Well, maybe not ‘always’; there had been a time when Josh had been that guy from Harvard who had come down for a debate at Princeton, been a smug jackass, and then got Sam incredibly, painfully drunk. But from then on, Josh had been a good friend. They had got into the habit of writing and then calling each other to give a round up of the week’s events. He had enjoyed the phone calls – life had always seemed less unmanageable when he had heard that mocking but welcome voice on the other end of the line. The girlfriend troubles had seemed less overwhelming, the essays had become more manageable after a little discussion of the problems he was having, the guys who didn’t like him had seemed less important, and the extra-curricular activities his father thought so trivial had seemed less insignificant. It was as if when talking to Josh that Josh had such a clear idea of who Sam was and who he would eventually become that Sam could see it too. He always came away from those calls with a more developed sense of his own identity and a feeling of profound gratitude towards the man who, as well as giving that to him, could somehow always make him laugh.

He had kept all Josh’s letters. He thought, sometimes, of how that would look, if he ever made it in politics and all his papers became something a biographer went through, looking for clues. But if anyone read the letters they would see why he had kept them; because they were funny and insightful and compassionate and informed, and they were like Josh had snipped off a piece of himself and sent it to Sam each week to keep him company. It fell to Sam to gather up all those pieces and keep them safe so he could give them back to Josh if he should have need of them.

After the shooting, Sam had been so angry he could barely see straight. He hadn’t wanted that to be the last act – that Josh had been shot, and that was it. He had wanted someone to pay. He had wanted some act of redress to take place so that it made sense. Josh had been shot and come _this_ close to dying but this or that had come from it, and that was why it had happened. But Josh had been right about suing them; it wasn’t the appropriate response. Sam had tried to think what an appropriate response was and had to suppress the part of himself that wanted to find every man who had ever been a member of the Ku Klux Klan and keep a damned fiery cross burning on their lawn for now and all eternity. He liked the imagery but from a practical and legal point of view he had to admit it was a non-starter. 

Josh had needed those pieces back after what they were trying _not_ to call his ‘breakdown’. He had needed all those pieces and more. After a few weeks of recovery he had needed so many pieces from Donna and Sam that Sam wondered if either of them would ever feel whole any more; if they had not become some kind of freakish gestalt entity in which Josh’s pain and their own neuroses rippled through one another like a carton of Ben and Jerry’s.

Sam hadn’t minded; he knew Donna hadn’t either. They had nearly lost Josh and the doctors had saved him. Perhaps there would come a time when Sam didn’t spend a few minutes out of every day just feeling grateful for that; when he would be able to look at Josh without seeing him lying on that gurney with blood pouring from his chest, that waxy look to his skin as his eyes began to lose focus. It hadn’t arrived yet though.

So, it was a long time now that Sam had known Josh was his best friend, and the person whose advice he would seek during a crisis. They had turned away from each other during their last crises for a good reason, he now realized. Because Josh’s building breakdown was like an escaping lava flow of rage. Josh was incredibly angry about what had been done to him; about being shot, and being forced to be that scared; to look into the jaws of death, that place of darkness that apparently didn’t look like a bright light, after all. Sam was one of the people he didn’t want getting hit by the shrapnel when he felt himself beginning to implode. Sam had been so hurt by that; wondering in confusion why Josh had shut him out just when he needed him most. Later, Josh had tried to make a stumbling explanation, too weary of his own psyche to want to talk about it for long, but letting Sam know that it was because the friendship mattered to him so much that he had wanted to keep it intact.

“I was angry with you. I was unreasoningly, viciously angry with you. And I was afraid that if I was alone in a room with you all this vile stuff was going to come spewing out that had nothing to do with you, or our friendship.”

“Why were you angry with me?”

“Because you were standing next to CJ and not me. Because you saved her from getting shot. Because you didn’t save me.”

Sam must have looked just as stricken as he felt because Josh had put his arms around him in an instant and pulled him in close, as if he wanted to absorb back the pain he had just caused. “That’s why, buddy, that’s why. Because I didn’t want to make you look like that. Because it was nothing to do with you. I wasn’t angry with you, but I would have taken it out on you. I would have found a way to make it your fault because the people whose fault it was are dead and I can’t say anything to hurt them and I’m still…reverberating from what they did to me. That’s why, Sam.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t standing next to you…” Sam had managed with difficulty.

Josh’s grip had tightened. “I’m not. What if they’d shot you? Do you think for one minute that I could have dealt with them shooting you? I don’t blame you. That’s the point. No rational part of my mind blames you or is angry with you, but when I was fragmenting, I was angry with everyone, and I would have hurt you too. And I don’t ever want to do that to my friends. I don’t ever want to do that to you.”

It hadn’t been tit-for-tat when Sam had been dealing with the realization that his father wasn’t the man he had always thought. He hadn’t shut Josh out to pay Josh back for shutting him out. He had just been in too much pain for anyone to help him. There was nothing that could be said or done that would help. He had been like some wounded animal who just needed to shut himself away until the pain began to hurt a little less.

Then the chronology of his learning about the President’s MS had implicated Josh and Toby in his being kept in the dark. They had known before him, which meant they were part of the decision to keep him in ignorance. He had tried not to blame them. He had told himself that it had been the President’s decision to tell him himself. They couldn’t do what the President had forbidden them to do. Still, he had felt betrayed by them as well as President Bartlet. They had left him alone for a little while then. He suspected neither one of them had known exactly how to deal with his bruised idealism. He had tried not to blame Josh for telling him Governor Bartlet was the real thing when he wasn’t, and by the time the need to constantly suppress those words was overcome Sam had realized that he always had been the real thing, after all. He just wasn’t perfect, and Josh had never told him that he was. No one had ever told him that he was. Sam had just assumed it, somehow, the way he did about all his friends, asking the impossible of them, so that when they slipped from their pedestals – as they all inevitably did – he felt wounded and betrayed.

None of that had been said aloud. No accusations and counter-accusations. The whole angry play had taken place in Sam’s head, and stayed in its confines, and, after a while, when they deemed him safe to approach, Josh and Toby had edged back to him and begun to ask his advice again and involve him in their decisions. But there had always been this extra effort Josh made from then on, to tell Sam that he mattered, that he was good at what he did, as if he feared that Sam’s confidence had received a mortal blow when President Bartlet had turned out to be imperfect. Perhaps it had. Sam’s affection for the President had come back, stronger than ever, and his admiration for the man, but perhaps some part of him that had been absolutely focused before, had lost direction. Perhaps that was why he had ended up in Orange County running for a political office that had come at the wrong time and in the wrong place.

But this time, in the crisis of his post-traumatic stress disorder, he had turned to Josh, or at least let Josh be the guy who was there for him, and it had worked very well. He had felt exhausted and oddly passive with the realization of how strung out and stressed he really was, and Josh had just taken charge. He had been given a month off and Josh had taken one too; even though it was impossible, of course, that Josh could be away from the White House for that long, but he had just shrugged and said he was owed a lot of leave, and Leo would manage. He had moved in with Sam for the duration so he could help Sam’s recovery. Not in a bustling, fussing, maternal kind of way, no lectures, no overt managing of the patient, he had just taken Sam home and stayed with him. 

At first, they sat on the couch in front of programs Josh selected or listened to the radio, and, every now and then, Josh would get up and order food for them. In the mornings he would suggest they went for a walk. Not the evenings. Just when it was light but still too early for the traffic to overwhelm the city, they would take a walk and hear the birds singing and look at the colors of the sky and say how peaceful it was, and how unlike DC. Then they would buy breakfast on the way home and the first few days, they had gone straight home to eat it, and the next day Josh had suggested that they eat in that place, the one with the garden, the one Donna liked, and although it was in the open, it had been familiar and Sam hadn’t felt so tense in there after the second time. And on the third time, Toby had met them for breakfast and talked about what was happening and how quiet it was without them.

After a few more days Josh had asked Sam to choose something for them to watch that evening while he showered, and then asked him to call in the order for dinner while he made a phone call. And Sam began to find himself doing every day things, but it didn’t feel as if these were tasks he was being set by therapists, it felt as if he was helping Josh out while Josh tried to do his work at the White House without actually being there.

There were a lot of calls, of course, and at first Josh had dealt with all of them, and then he’d rolled his eyes a few times and handed the caller off to Sam, and Sam had held some long, interesting conversations with Leo about policy, and CJ had needed some background material on the agriculture subsidies bill and Donna had needed to talk to him about Josh’s socks – or at least he seemed to remember that the beginning of the conversation had been something to do with Josh’s socks, although they had ended up talking about a lot of other things, like the new guy she was dating and how it had been so long since any relationship had lasted the distance with her that she couldn’t tell how you knew and did Sam knew how you knew…? Sam had not known how you knew, on account of not being able to get a relationship to last the distance either, but they talked about possible ways of discerning it anyway; like the ways that friendships worked and how the same criteria should apply to romance. Toby phoned most days to read paragraphs out to him and to ask him what he thought. Josh would usually take the phone away and say: “He’s on a break” and Sam would have to recapture it from him and wave Josh away and ask Toby to repeat it. Quite often, something that Toby wrote would need a little tweaking and Sam could see how if he moved the sentences around or cut one the paragraph would be stronger, and sometimes Toby would phone to ask him about a quote and its provenance. 

“I can see the book it’s in but I am honestly too tired to walk across the room and pick it up. ‘You are the window through which you must see the world’ – Wilde or Shaw?”

“Shaw.”

“Are you sure? Because as I was saying that I was wondering if Wells…?”

“It’s definitely Shaw. And there’s a line before it about keeping yourself clean and bright _because_ et cetera….”

He and Toby had talked about possible sources for relevant quotes for a while. Sam had told him about a book Josh had bought him; an anthology of environmental poetry; and how he thought they needed to get back to that in their speech writing, this sense of the land as something man had always husbanded and harnessed for his own needs, but never destructively until now. Something about the age of the planet and their status as comparative latecomers as a species, and how they should be shepherds of the planet, not plunderers. Toby had made a lot of notes and occasionally shouted ‘Talk slower’ at him down the phone, and challenged him and Sam had defended his position because he had spent the past three days thinking about this and knew he was right, and at the end of two hours of conversation, Sam became aware that there was an empty plate on his lap, proving that Josh had evidently put food in his lap and he had eaten it without even noticing, so caught up had he been in his conversation with Toby.

He had stopped hearing the ‘click’ once it had been identified. Like some monster of old, knowing its name was enough to stop it having any power over him. But it had given him the impetus to admit to himself how scared he had been. And to let himself off the hook for that; to decide that it was okay to be scared of dying in a life-or-death situation. 

He was even sleeping for sometimes six hours at a stretch. And when he woke up gasping for air as he felt the cold filthy water closing over his head and filling his lungs, the panic receded much faster for knowing that Josh was in the next room. Sometimes Josh wasn’t even that far away, he was sitting on the bed, saying, “Hey, Buddy…” Trying to smile reassuringly at Sam while his eyes were full of concern. Sam wondered if the many congressman who Josh had strong-armed into submission over the years had any idea how gentle Josh could be with his friends.

Sam would snatch air back into his lungs while Josh rubbed his shoulder reassuringly and then, when he was sure Sam was no longer hyperventilating, would go into the kitchen and make them both hot chocolate, the actual hot milk in a pan kind. Sam guessed that was what Josh’s father had done for him when he had woken up all those nights after nights smelling smoke and thinking he heard Joanie call to him. That’s why he never made jokes about it. Didn’t make the mistake of thinking this was all about him, or their occasional need to make him the universal younger brother; this was a ritual precious to Josh into whose rites Sam had been admitted. It was a privilege and he recognized that and was careful to say only: “Thank you” with sincere appreciation.

“You okay…?” Josh would ask when the hot chocolate was drunk – always in Sam’s bedroom. Josh needing to stay there until Sam had drunk every last sip; Sam already feeling sleepy, even though he knew that hot chocolate he made himself would never have that effect; as if there was an incantation mixed in with it of all the times a young Josh had been given this treatment and it had worked. It felt as if there was some paternal love mixed in with it; an indefinable ingredient that existed only in Josh’s memories, and yet somehow made its way into the chocolate Sam drank. That there was fraternal love, Sam had no doubt. He remembered, growing up, how he had been aware of the empty space an older brother or sister should have been occupying. Never feeling like an only child. Knowing, even if the younger sibling came along whose company he had craved for so long in vain, that he wouldn’t feel entirely like an older brother either. He had been cheated of a sibling who benevolently tyrannized him and made sure the bullying never got too bad, and who was there to defend him when he really needed it, and to sit on his bed at night after a bad day and say something to him that would make him laugh.

And then he had met Josh and realized that the Lyman family had obligingly raised and kept his older brother for him, and when he met Toby – then had come the realization that he had always been the youngest of three. A truth he knew the other two recognized as absolutely as did he, but something they should never admit to, certainly not in public, or else some inviolate pact would be broken. 

“Do you want me to stay?”

Sam knew it should have been funny; Josh was sitting on his bed in his boxers and t-shirt, gazing into his eyes with so much concern and _that_ close to asking him if he wanted him to read to him. And yet they were both thirty-something males – no, wait, Josh was a forty-something now – even more ludicrous then. Both adults and not genetically related, and a number of people, probably far more than they had ever realized, thought that their relationship occasionally veered to the panting and sweaty side of platonic. And they both knew it, and had made jokes about it, and occasionally liked even to get to the very edge of flirting to annoy women or subtly turn them on… and yet, in this quiet time in the dead of night, when Sam’s heartbeat was slowly returning to a regular rhythm, gunshots and shouting and blows and the sound of a gun being cocked receding into the stillness of his clock ticking and his and Josh’s quiet breathing, it didn’t seem in any way strange that Josh should ask if he wanted him to stay in case the nightmares came back. It was exactly as if they really did have a whole set of shared memories of nights when Sam had been seven years old and frightened of the monsters in his closet and Josh had been the patient older brother opening the door one more time to show him there was nothing in there but their toys.

Sam knew he should have been a lot more amused than he was, and probably a lot less moved, as he saw the reflection of that in Josh’s lamp-lit half-smile. He gave Josh that wry look, despite what were probably tears of emotion in his eyes, to let him know that it was kind of a loaded question, and Josh managed to find a grin back, even though his eyes were still in full on hundred percent anxious big brother mode. Josh half-shrugged. “Because, what I really think this administration needs right now is a new scandal.”

Sam managed a smile of his own. “Absolutely.”

Josh said gently: “So, do you want me to stay?”

Sam laughed. “Honestly? I want you to stay and read me _Winnie the Pooh_ , the chapter when they first meet Tigger, and I want you to read it to me in that really bad English accent you can’t do properly. But if I let you do that I can’t ever complain about you and Toby acting like I’m the kid brother Mom asked you to mind. So, no, I don’t want you to stay. And thank you for the hot chocolate. And I won’t have any more bad dreams.”

Josh nodded and rose to his feet. “I’d read it to you, you know. Although I deny that my English accent is bad. I think it’s actually pretty jolly good and super too.”

“It’s terrible. And I know you would, Josh. And thank you.”

Josh paused in the doorway, seeming to have trouble finding his usual voice. “This is, of course, all just a ploy to induce you to have sex with me so that Amy and Donna will both be driven nuts with jealousy.”

“I know.” Sam nodded solemnly. “I’m well aware of that. Although have you considered the strategy of just telling them you’re having sex with me so that they would be driven nuts with jealousy?”

Josh frowned. “Actually, no. I thought my claims might lack conviction.”

“We could go into work wearing each other’s shirts?” Sam suggested.

“Empirical evidence.” Josh nodded. “I like it. It’s sneaky and plays on their preconceived perceptions of us as incompetents.”

“I think it’s a winning strategy myself. Although…” Sam gave the plan a moment’s thought and felt some doubt trickle in. “What if they just nodded sagely and went ‘Ah hah – I always knew it’?”

Josh’s brow furrowed. “That’s a real and present danger. That is, in fact, almost word for word what Mandy’s reaction was that time.”

“What time?”

“You know – that time.”

Sam remembered and winced. “Oh yes.”

“There wasn’t any surprise at all really – which I still resent. What if they did that and then Amy started getting onto us to come out? And then if we started denying we were doing anything except trying to mess with their heads, she would think less of me for not being honest about my sexual orientation. Not to mention the fact that she really likes you and wouldn’t want to – you know – trespass on your turf, so might decide I was already spoken for and move onto that guy she’s been dating.”

“Hasn’t she already technically moved onto him if she’s actually dating him?”

“I like to think she’s in a non-celibate holding pattern waiting for me to get back to her.”

“And I can see why you might like to tell yourself that.”

Josh paused with his hand on the door, body half in and half out of the room. “I’m just across the hall. I’m one not even very loud yell away. Okay?”

It was absurd, of course. Sam wasn’t a child. But it was so reassuring, and deep inside, somewhere he stored away for later, he was pathetically grateful. He had a sudden stab of doubt. “Josh…?”

Josh was out of the door but came back in again, at once. “Yes?”

“When you were… After you were shot. Did I say the right things?”

Josh gave him a tired and very gentle smile. “Yes.”

“Because I didn’t know then what to say and I…”

“You said the right things, Sam. You said all the right things. You always do.” And then Josh left him for the rest of the night, Sam feeling warm and drowsy with hot chocolate and kindness and praise, and the unshakeable bridge of their friendship.

_I should never have been in California, he thought as he drifted back to sleep. This is always where I was meant to be…._

***

Sam felt that it was a minor triumph that Josh and Toby had reluctantly agreed that they could all go out for a drink tonight. Well, everyone except Donna, who had another date with Patrick, which Sam thought was a good idea and Josh thought was a very, very bad one. She had immediately suggested breaking the date, but Sam had told her it was fine, they would be going out again – this was just a test drive for Josh and Toby to see how their shattered nerves stood up under the strain.

“But you’re telling them it’s a test drive for _your_ shattered nerves?” Donna observed.

Sam nodded. “It seemed best.”

Donna also nodded. “Probably wise, Sam.”

Mallory had suggested that she came along too, which Sam had also thought was a good idea and Josh had thought would mean that Mallory would probably want to use Sam for sex at some later point in the evening. In vain had Sam tried to impress upon Josh that he didn’t actually mind women using him for sex, especially when they were very attractive women with whom he was more than somewhat smitten. Josh had decided that he knew best when it came to what was good for Sam and what was not. He had said some pointed things to CJ and demanded that they were passed onto Mallory, which would no doubt mean that no part of Sam’s therapy for the evening would involve him going home with Mallory and having lots of sex. 

There were lots of things he could have said to Josh and Toby about their determination to stop him from ever having a social life again, too, but he hadn’t said a word. They had both been so kind to him that every time he started to voice that he really was feeling a lot better now, his words of protest fizzled somehow. Perhaps the point was no longer how he was feeling, but how they were feeling. And he was beginning to suspect that Josh felt…well, pretty much the way that Sam had felt when Josh was shot; as if he had a lot of anger still left to displace. At some point, Sam thought they were probably going to have to have a talk about that, and how Sam understood how it felt to want to punch a wall because one was not the kind of guy who went and punched another human being even if one had come _this_ close to losing one’s best friend forever, and was still pretty shaken up about it. In some ways he was now thinking that him being kept safe had become something he was allowing Josh and Toby to do, because they needed to, rather than something that he still needed. 

Was it annoying that they were so over-protective he could barely linger in a bathroom stall without one of them coming to check that he hadn’t been kidnapped? Yes, of course it was. Was it touching? Yes, of course it was. Was he grateful? God, yes, every day he was so very grateful for all the hundred little acts of kindness he had been shown by everyone in the White House. He was grateful for everything, from the way Ginger shut the door extra carefully so he wouldn’t be jolted by any unexpected noises, to the way President Bartlet had made a point of walking in on that meeting with the Minority Whip when things were getting a little short-tempered and Sam had discovered he still had something of a problem with raised voices. 

He had been back at work for nearly three weeks now. There had been protests about him going back so soon, but the truth was he had missed the place, missed the energy and rhythm. Everyone else had left the decision to Josh – Josh was the one who was seeing Sam every day so the person deemed the most likely to correctly assess his mental state. Sam had years of practice now in bending Josh to his will. It wasn’t that he manipulated him; but they had been friends for so long, and he knew Josh so well, and…and okay perhaps there was some manipulation involved. Perhaps Sam had made his arguments at double speed and with relentless repetition and not been above giving Josh begging looks at the same time, knowing that Josh was well practised in being amused by Sam and surprised by Sam but no good at all at being tough with Sam. Either way, after two weeks of his supposed ‘month off’, Josh had caved, and Sam had been packed off to visit Josh’s psychiatrist – who, Sam supposed he should now think of as his psychiatrist, too – and been pronounced as mentally well as could be expected under the circumstances.

Since then he had been protected and coddled and chaperoned and watched over but he had been permitted to go back to work. Work had been interesting. Bills had stealthily acquired unwanted amendments and needed to be saved. Will Bailey had come in to see Sam to make a breathless speech – which, as far as Sam could tell, contained no punctuation of any kind – about how Sam’s kidnapping was basically _all Will’s fault_ because if he had just found another name to give Kay Wilde than Sam wouldn’t have had to run the first time, which meant he wouldn’t have run the second time, which would have meant he wasn’t even in California to be kidnapped by White Supremacists and – That was the point when even Will had actually needed to snatch a breath, which had given Sam time to jump in and reassure Will Bailey that no one blamed Will for Sam being kidnapped and Sam had always wanted to go into political office, and – 

“But, don’t you see? That just makes it worse. Because now you’re not in political office, you’re back here, writing speeches and – ”

“And this where I want to be and no one blames you, Will. No one. Especially not me. I blame you even less than the other people who don’t blame you.”

“Josh and Toby blame me. I read it in their eyes.”

“That’s your imagination.” It had taken a lot of fast talking but he had managed to talk Will down from his place of lacerating guilt and self-loathing and send him back to the Vice President’s office. Whereupon he had just checked with Toby and Josh that they didn’t blame Will Bailey. “Because you know that would be crazy, right?”

“Oh yes, absolutely,” Josh shrugged. “But, we still blame him.”

“Yes,” Toby confirmed. “We do.”

“But that’s nuts. That makes no sense of any kind.”

“Nevertheless, we do,” Toby assured him.

“Why?” Sam demanded.

Josh looked at Toby and shrugged. “I think mostly because we can.”

Toby nodded. “Yes, he’s convenient.”

“And local.”

“Well, I think you should stop blaming him and you should tell him that you never have.” Sam had reeled out of that meeting knowing that it was now indisputable that the wrong people in the White House were in therapy and he should perhaps try to get Dr Keyworth to give Josh a call after their next session.

CJ had started dating a guy she had met at her gym who was a few years younger than her, causing a ripple effect of anxiety throughout the Bullpen as Toby and Josh started worrying about a woman their age no longer being interested in men of their age. Sam had spent quite a lot of time reassuring Josh that his receding hairline made him look ‘distinguished’ after that. Josh had made a crack about CJ that had unfortunately been picked up on the microphones of reporters. CJ was still pretty pissed about that. Donna had continued dating a guy pretty much her own age, which had made Josh sulk and act out while pretending that he wasn’t. He had been driven to call Amy only to find out that she was still dating another guy, and Joey Lucas was still definitely the mother of another man’s child, and life, as Josh had told Sam sulkily, just sucked sometimes. 

Donna’s murmured repetition of: _So many women so little charm_ had possibly been heard at that point, but Sam had insisted that he had heard nothing at all, except possibly Donna saying something about a document needing Josh’s signature, and had then had lunch with Donna and told her that he thought she should be nicer to Josh for the next few days as he was – 

“Having a mid-life crisis?” Donna demanded brightly in between chewing on sticks of celery. “Being unbearable to everyone, well…except you.” She gazed at Sam narrowly. “Why, when Josh is acting out, doesn’t he act out at you?”

“He does sometimes…” Sam protested.

“Oh, like once in his entire life. If Josh treated me the way he treats you I wouldn’t be dating Patrick right now. Or I might be, but I would be wondering why I wasn’t dating Josh. In fact, right now I’m sitting here wondering why _you’re_ not dating Josh….”

Sam could not have said it was a particularly productive lunch. He had come back to find Josh picking disconsolately at a salad in Sam’s office – and as Josh never ate salad he knew he had to be miserable. “Did you say nice things about me?” Josh demanded, as he walked in the door.

“Yes.”

“Did you say bad things about Patrick?”

“I haven’t met Patrick and everyone who has says he’s a very nice guy.”

“How is that relevant?”

“My mistake. Next time I see Donna I’ll be sure to tell her he eats babies.”

“Thank you.” Josh picked at a lettuce leaf he clearly had no intention of actually eating. “What did she say about me?”

“That we should be dating.”

“You and me?”

“Yes.”

“Not either me and Donna or you and Donna?”

“No.”

“Just you and me?”

“Yes.”

“Did she mention why?”

“She said you were always nice to me.”

Josh blinked. “What did you say?”

“I said sometimes you weren’t.”

Josh looked hurt. “You said that?”

“Yes, and then I couldn’t think of a time when you hadn’t been nice to me, and Donna said ‘ah hah’ and seemed to think she had won that particular argument. So we talked about CJ’s toyboy. Donna says he’s apparently very…you know…in bed.”

“So, you basically proposed no reason why Donna should prefer me to Patrick – not that I care – said nothing _against_ Patrick, could come up with no good reason why you and I shouldn’t be dating, and then talked about how much more virile younger men are?”

Sam went over the lunchtime conversation in his mind, trying to find a flaw in Josh’s summary. “Well – in a manner of speaking – yes, but…”

“You mean – ‘in a manner of speaking’…accurately?” Josh looked at him narrowly for a moment and then sighed in defeat. “And yet I still find myself tending towards forgiving you. Go and get me a muffin instead of this rabbit food and it’s a done deal.”

Sam had been more pleased than not about the muffin order; it felt like an approach to normality in Josh’s behavior towards him. He was out of the door and striding towards the canteen before Josh caught up with him. Sam sighed. “Josh…?”

“I just need to stretch my legs. And to make sure you understand that I want a muffin from _inside_ the building. You know that, right?”

“Really? Because I was going to run over and get it for you from the Daily Gangland Shooting Muffin Store. I hear their blueberry ones are particularly good.”

“Sam…”

“I’m getting you a muffin from inside the building, Josh. It will probably be chocolate-flavored. It may even have frosting. I really don’t need you to come with me.”

Josh shrugged. “If I’m going to be eating a chocolate muffin with frosting, I probably need the exercise.”

Sam had sighed again and they had made the trip to the canteen together. Sam had reminded himself more than once that Josh had always been nice to him. “Except for that time you got me drunk in college,” he remembered triumphantly as they paid for their muffins. There was a sudden silence in the canteen as the waitresses exchanged meaningful looks. In some embarrassment Sam cleared his throat and delved for change. “I’ll get the muffins.”

Josh gave him an exasperated look. “I’ll let you.”

“I was just trying to think of times when you weren’t nice to me.”

“Can you try thinking it inside your head?”

“I’m sorry. I can tell Donna about it though.”

“That I got you drunk in college? How is that going to help the situation _in any way_?”

Sam had shuffled back to his office, with an exasperated Josh still watching over him. Sam offered apologetically: “I don’t think I’m cut out for this match-making stuff. It’s too Byzantine and complicated.”

“Just as well you didn’t go into some really Machiavellian career like politics, isn’t it?” Josh came into his office with him and sat on his desk.

“Don’t you have work to do?” Sam pleaded. “Because I have work to do.”

Ignoring him, Josh said: “And another reason why Amy shouldn’t be dating that senator is….”

Two hours later Sam had finally been able to get back to his work.

 

Zoey had come to see him on his second week back and given him the sympathetic smile of one kidnap victim to another. “I know it sucks, but it does get better.”

“Post-traumatic stress disorder?” Sam had been poised mid-sentence but he didn’t mind this particular interruption. He could actually write again, and, as he had told Dr. Keyworth – that was the proof that he was mentally well again, because the sentences were flowing once more. But he had been hoping to see Zoey at some point so they could exchange notes, not about the act of being kidnapped – unless she wanted to, of course – but about the long slow haul that was the aftermath.

“No, I mean – yes, that gets better too, but I mean the fussing. After a while they dial it down again.”

Sam thought of the shrieks of horror that had greeted his suggestion that he might spend his lunch-hour in a bookstore. “How much of a while?” 

Zoey grimaced. “Six months. And they do at least try to pretend they’re not totally paranoid for the last month of that time too.”

“I’ve been back at work for two weeks. You’re telling me I have another five months and two weeks of this before I’m going to be able to buy my own lunch without a chaperone?”

“You have to give them time. You have to be very patient and recognize that they suffered a terrible experience and that they’re not responsible for their emotional state.”

Sam sighed. “How many times a day – on average – would you say you have to remind yourself of that?”

Zoey shook her head dismissively. “No more than…okay, three or four. Five tops.”

Sam sat back in his chair in defeat. “I think I may go insane.”

“No, no, you just have to give them time, trust me. They do get better.”

“I can’t go away for a while and then come back and find they’re okay again?”

Sighing, she shook her head. “That would just exacerbate the paranoia. The thing is to be very understanding. And if possible to have access to a soundproofed room where you can take refuge and scream. Oh, and it’s very important that you remind yourself that there are times when you really want them there.”

Sam thought of waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, tasting the tainted water in his mouth, hearing the gunfire. Josh being there to tell him everything was okay and he was safe. “That’s true.”

“And they’re only doing it because they love you.”

He sighed. “I know.”

“And here’s my number.” She held it out, and Sam thought not for the first time how much he liked the childlike economy of her movements and how she and Charlie really should get back together some time soon. “Because I think people with carers with PTSD should stick together.”

He felt a rush of gratitude. “Zoey, you’re a princess.”

“I’m so glad you’re okay, Sam.” She got tears in her eyes and then they were hugging, and of course that had been the moment when Charlie and the President walked in to ask him if he’d seen Zoey anywhere, and gave Sam looks of shocked disapproval as he and Zoey peeled themselves apart. But he had pocketed that number and called her on the weekend, where they had talked about her homework a lot and laughed about things that were probably a little girlish. Josh had insisted that they were, anyway. Or insisted that they sounded as if they were. Sam had decided not to mind.

Zoey, of course, had not been permitted to accompany them tonight. Sam knew he was fortunate that no secret service agents had died protecting him. Molly’s death was going to be held over Zoey’s head until President Bartlet’s term of office was over; no, it was going to be held over her head forever; in her conscience if not in words spoken aloud by others. Someone else had paid with their life for Zoey’s attempt to live a normal life, and for her poor choice in boyfriends. He had, at least, been spared that particular guilt trip.

 

Sam had never known Josh and Toby wound so tight. They had breezed through election days with less stress. It was exasperating, but it also upped his feeling of protectiveness towards them. It seemed to him that in the last few weeks, he felt closer to when Josh had been shot than ever before. He kept remembering how Josh and Toby had looked in the hospital; how much weight they’d both lost; those shadows under their eyes. The way Josh was there in an instant if Sam woke up in the night, being the brother who saved his sibling this time; who didn’t let the flames win. He found himself wanting to say: _Josh, it wasn’t your fault that Joanie died and it wasn’t your fault that I was shot_. But he could hardly feel any real annoyance at the illogical nature of Josh’s response when his had been equally illogical. Recently when he woke up in the night, he didn’t hear the gunfire whose ricochets had broken his clavicle; he heard the shots that had almost killed Josh. The tenderness he felt for him could hardly have been increased if they had been related; they were both bound together by the shared knowledge of how terrible a thing it was to almost lose one’s best friend. In the night when they conversed in unnecessary whispers after a nightmare, it was now impossible to say who was comforting whom or for what. Sam liked to think that Toby was doing a little better, but on the evidence of tonight, maybe not. Certainly, as they entered the same Georgetown Bar in which they had shared a drink all those years before, slipping back into the noise and fug of the place in what Sam hoped was a discreet fashion, Josh and Toby were as one in the way they started scanning the room for possible dangers.

“Guys,” he murmured, “it’s just a bar.” He almost said more, said: _It’s two months since I was shot. There are Secret Service guys outside. Also, Charlie is with us, and CJ, and Mallory, all of whom can probably punch better than either one of you…._

He said none of it aloud, of course. Thinking about Zoey again, Sam turned to look at Charlie. “Why aren’t you and Zoey back together again?”

Charlie began to steer Sam towards the table at which Mallory and CJ were already seated, a hand on his arm as he did so. Everyone now seemed to feel they had the right to treat Sam like something fragile and in need of protection since the kidnapping, even someone technically considerably younger than he was. “Because last time Zoey and I were together people got shot.”

“But when she was with that annoying French boy, people got shot, too,” Sam pointed out. “And Zoey was kidnapped. She was never kidnapped when she was dating you. I think you could take that as a sign that you’re meant to be together, were you inclined to be guided by auguries of that kind.”

“Are you giving me dating advice?” Charlie asked in some exasperation as he steered Sam to a chair. “Because you’re so very not qualified. In fact there is no one at this table qualified _in any way_ to give me dating advice.”

Mallory held up a hand. “I consider myself reasonably qualified.”

“How many times have you been engaged?” Charlie demanded.

Mallory considered the point and then said defensively: “Well, Sam has a broken engagement too.”

“That was never going to happen,” Josh assured her comfortably.

“It could have happened,” Sam protested.

“Never going to. Don’t kid yourself.”

CJ nodded sagely. “The whole Sherbourne-Seaborn surname disaster should have told everyone that from the outset.”

“Lisa was going to keep her own name,” Sam retorted. “There was no question of alliterative hyphenation.”

Mallory turned to CJ. “Let’s give Sam lots of alcohol and then see if he can still manage that sentence.”

“He can’t drink alcohol, he’s on painkillers,” Toby said at once.

“I didn’t take them today expressly so that I _could_ in fact drink alcohol, if necessary in copious amounts.”

Toby turned to Josh as Mallory, CJ, and Charlie went to fetch more drinks for everyone. “Are you subscribing to this madness?”

“Hey, you’re the one who said our little boy was all grown up.”

Sam looked at Toby in disbelief. “You used those actual words? Out loud? And where other people could hear them?”

Toby returned his gaze levelly. “And at what age did you stop getting carded? Let’s discuss that for a moment, shall we?”

“I don’t see that it’s relevant,” Sam insisted loftily.

Josh bent his head to murmur quietly: “Are you sure you’re okay with being here…?”

“I’m fine,” Sam assured him. 

“Because if you’re not you only need to…”

“I know.”

“I’m just saying…”

“And I’m grateful, but…”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Josh, will you back off and give the man some air?” CJ demanded. “He wants to do something normal with normal people in a normal place, so can you stop stepping all over the normality and act…”

“Normal?” Toby suggested.

“I’m not asking for a miracle, just act like you’re a smug, pompous politico who assumes every woman in the room wants to have sex with you. It will be just like you’re yourself.”

Josh sat back in his chair. “You’re still pissed about the height crack?”

“Yes, Joshua, oddly enough being compared to a giraffe on rollerskates rarely wins my undying affection.”

“I didn’t know the cameras were there. Or the microphones.”

“I was walking with a slight list because of a blister on my right heel sustained in the good old fashioned art of hiking.”

“The things that women will do to have sex with men who aren’t me never ceases to amaze me,” Toby observed.

“I happen to enjoy hiking,” CJ insisted.

“You hate hiking. You just didn’t want your new boytoy to think that you have no interest in Nature or the natural world,” Toby retorted.

“I have a lot of interest in Nature. I observe it often at my local gym. A place, incidentally, where I have met many interesting men, none of whom are currently sitting at this table. And he is not a ‘boytoy’. The age difference is in fact so minor as to be irrelevant.”

“What’s the age difference?” Mallory asked Toby who made motions with his fingers to denote years.

“You’re just jealous because I’m the only one here who is having sex on a regular basis,” CJ returned.

“I could be having sex,” Josh insisted. “Or at least pretending to be having sex.”

CJ looked at him over the edge of her drink. “With whom could you be pretending to be having sex?”

“I’ve been staying at Sam’s place for weeks – did no one think we might be having sex?”

Toby grimaced. “Why would I want to think about that when I could be thinking about something that was…not that?”

Charlie nodded. “Of all the things I want to think about in an evening, that would be absolutely nowhere on my list.”

CJ snorted. “No way could you pull Sam, Josh. I’m sorry, but he’s out of your league.”

“What?” Josh looked at her in disbelief. “We’ve been best friends since college.”

“Yes, but only friends-friends, not groin buddies. Look at him.”

Everyone turned to look at Sam, who shifted in his seat uncomfortably. 

CJ shrugged and took another sip of her grasshopper. “It’s not that you’re not attractive, but…Sam’s out of your league.”

“I dated Mandy.”

“Mandy’s an attractive woman, but she’s not Sam league.”

“What about Amy?”

“Well, I always felt you were punching above your weight with her, too, but maybe she was on the rebound.”

Toby rolled his eyes. “Josh, trust me on this, you don’t want to have this conversation.”

Still indignant and ignoring Toby, Josh pointed a glass at Sam. “Sam’s recently been traumatized and you still think he’s out of my league?”

CJ considered the point. “Well, he _is_ in a very emotionally vulnerable state right now. But all the same – ”

Josh turned to Sam. “Sam, if we were gay, you’d have sex with me, wouldn’t you?”

Sam sighed. “CJ’s just trying to get a rise, Josh. She’s winding you up for fun.”

CJ beamed around at the table. “And I would just like to confirm – for anyone watching from the bleachers – that winding up Josh Lyman is indeed all kinds of fun.”

“I’m just saying I’d like the affirmation.”

Sam sighed again, while CJ smirked and Toby and Charlie tried not to giggle. Mallory didn’t even try not to giggle she just went right ahead and did it. Wearily, Sam said, “Yes, Josh, if we were gay, I’d have sex with you.”

“Ah hah!” Josh stabbed a triumphant finger at CJ. “Told you.”

“Yes, but it would be a pity…thing. I don’t think it counts.”

“I have a fan club!” Josh protested. “I have girls sending me their underwear. There is a whole forum of women who obsess about me twenty-four-seven.”

“The fan club is made up of people who have never actually met you. The underwear sent to you was Donna’s, and the forum of women are unhinged.”

Josh turned to Sam in desperation. “Sam – tell her!”

“What exactly do you want me to tell her?” Sam asked in some confusion.

“How people think that we have sex.”

Sam turned to CJ. “People think that we have sex.”

Toby rolled his eyes. “Please do talk about the two of you having sex a little louder, as I’m not sure all the reporters in this place have got the story yet.”

“What people? I want names and addresses.” CJ wasn’t even pretending not to be enjoying herself now.

“The guys who were here the last time we were all in here,” Josh said triumphantly. “They thought Sam and I were having sex.”

Sam tried to remember the conversation. “Actually, I think they thought Charlie and I were having sex.”

“Well, they thought you and I were having sex too.”

CJ took another sip of her drink. “Was that a threesome or was Sam just two-timing you both?”

“And every reporter in here is now looking this way,” Toby observed.

“Can you leave me out of this?” Charlie demanded, coming back with yet more drinks despite the number of empty glasses now lined up in front of CJ and Mallory. “I don’t want to be part of your fantasy sex-lives.”

“ _Every_ reporter.”

“I’m just asking, Josh, and correct me if I’m wrong, but has someone who could get paid three thousand dollars a night for their services ever offered you a freebie just because they really like the look of you?”

“No, but – ”

“I rest my case. That’s hard currency, buddy. Sam is a three thousand dollars a night guy. I don’t think you’d be fetching that kind of money on the open market.”

Toby put a hand over his eyes. “And the chances of tonight passing without feeding the gossip columns just faded into the ether. Sam is going to be all over Page Six tomorrow and the items are going to be so far from blind that people even _with_ a seeing-eye dog will be able to determine his identity.”

CJ patted him on the shoulder. “While it’s good to know that you keep up to date with the world of Ted Casablanca, Toby, I think you should probably be quiet now.”

“I’m not the one telling the world that Sam is worth three thousand dollars a night.”

“I never really thought of it that way.” Mallory looked Sam up and down. “Perhaps I’ve been looking at the fact you were hugging a hooker when we were sort of dating in the wrong light. Perhaps I should have been focusing more on what that said about your market value.”

“We weren’t ‘dating’,” Sam insisted.

“Hence the ‘sort of’.”

“We weren’t even ‘sort of’ dating. You told me there would be no sex for me of any kind.”

“Oh yes, that’s not going to add to the scandal columns either,” Toby sighed.

Mallory shrugged. “I told you that, but that didn’t mean that there wouldn’t have been. I may have changed my mind.”

“You told me you were a woman of your word.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. But I’m sure you told me that.”

“Well, I think you’re mistaken, and, what’s more, I think you’re wrong.”

“So, you’re saying that even if you told me right now that if I went home with you tonight there would be no sex for me, there might be sex for me?”

“Certainly not. I wouldn’t dream of coming between you and Josh.”

Sam turned pleading eyes on Josh who hastened to assure Mallory – and as Toby pointed out – any listening members of the press – that he and Sam were only having pretend sex to undermine CJ’s assertion that the rest of them were, in fact, sad losers who could not get a date. 

“An assertion that I will further…assert is – if harsh – also accurate,” CJ observed.

Toby regarded her narrowly. “How many of those grasshoppers have you had?”

“So, Sam is in fact still single and dateless and sad?” Mallory pressed.

Josh nodded emphatically. “Absolutely.”

Mallory shrugged. “Sounds like I should save my three thousand bucks and pick someone more in demand and a lot less expensive.”

“I don’t charge anything! I’m not the one who charged. The whole measuring of my worth by the unit of money that could have been earned by someone who instead chose to sleep with me was always a fallacious argument based on a… You’re totally making fun of me, aren’t you?”

“I am.” Mallory nodded sagely. “And I can confirm that it is, as CJ said, very enjoyable.”

Sam turned to Josh. “Okay, that’s it, I’m abjuring the company of women until further notice. Let’s go and buy a book that tells us how we should be having sex.”

Josh nodded decisively. “An excellent idea.”

“You’re using the word ‘abjure’ in everyday conversation and you still don’t know why you’re single?” CJ demanded.

Ignoring her, Sam forged on relentlessly: “It had better be one with some diagrams. And some…accoutrements. In fact is there perhaps a kit of some kind?”

Toby gave Sam a look of disbelief. “On a scale of one to ten – how likely do you think it is that the average American drugstore is going to stock the Mid-Life Crisis Go Gay Today Starter Pack with free instructional video and a week’s supply of Astroglide?”

“Well, if they did, they would be guaranteed a sale right here,” Sam retorted.

Josh looked smugly at CJ. “Told you I could pull Sam.”

 

Sam had insisted that he bought the next round of drinks. He wanted to prove to himself and to everyone else at that table that he could get up, walk the ten feet to a bar in a crowded room, and order a round of drinks, without either having a panic attack or Josh or Toby having one. So far, he was doing fine; he wasn’t so sure about them, but he thought that if he didn’t look back, as Orpheus should have refrained from looking back at Eurydice, a disaster could be averted. 

“Hello, Fairy Poppins.” 

Sam turned his head in disbelief. It couldn’t be… It was. More surprised than perturbed he found himself gazing into the eyes of the ringleader of the three of grad students who had so resented Charlie’s attempted rescue of Zoey from their unwanted advances.

“Well, déjà vu…” Sam murmured.

The fair-haired one bustled closer. “Wanna go?”

Sam waited for the spasm of instinctive fear to kick in and was a little surprised when it didn’t. No, what he appeared to be feeling was the same instinctive irritation he’d felt last time. “Want to go where?” he enquired sarcastically. “Are you propositioning me? Because I have to tell you, right now, none of you are my type.”

“You’re the only faggot here,” the third one snapped ominously.

Rolling his eyes, Sam said: “Do you guys really have a college education? Because – if you do, I’m not convinced we’ve been spending the taxpayers’ money as wisely as we could have been.”

“Get the hell away from him, right now.”

Sam looked around in shock to find Josh standing behind him, looking murderous. It was instinctive to move in front of him in case there should be a fight. Josh had never been the kind of guy who knew how to throw a punch, whereas years of being beaten up in school had actually given Sam a quite useful right hook. It probably wasn’t as good as he thought it was; but it had on occasion made contact with the face of people hitting him hard enough to make them stop. Admittedly he had always had trouble afterwards trying to move his fingers, but he still considered himself more the expert in the art of fisticuffs than either Josh or Toby.

The first ex-grad student gave Josh a dismissive glance and then turned his attention back to Sam. “We threw a party when those guys grabbed you.”

“Yeah…” the fair-haired one grinned pleasurably. “Saw it on the news. We cheered every night.”

“Kept hoping we’d get a newsflash giving us some extra good news,” the third confirmed.

The first leaned in close to say: “We guessed they threw their own party with you, didn’t they, pretty boy? Tell me, how many times did they make you take it up the – ?” 

In a voice completely unlike his own, Josh ground out: “Finish that sentence and, I swear to God, I will kill you.”

Sam moved himself even more fore-squarely in front of Josh and put up a hand to stop the aggressor; feeling it jolt down his elbow into his shoulder as the ex-grad student moved forward in response to Josh’s threat and Sam’s open palm brought him up short. “Back off,” Sam told him shortly.

“You don’t have the President’s daughter with you this time, fairyboys,” the fair-haired one snapped. “That means you don’t have the secret service to save your faggot asses. Just like when your little friend there was giving it up for the Klu Klux Klan.”

“It’s _Ku_ Klux Klan, you moron.” Toby sounded as unlike himself as Josh had done: “And you have to the count of three to get away from Sam. One. Two.”

“Gee, I’m scared.” The ringleader widened his eyes in a pretence of fear before his gaze settled on Sam again. “Those guys with the guns? When they’d finished making you suck them off, they should have put a bullet right between your big blue – ”

Sam was abruptly shoved into something soft – that turned out to be Charlie; who caught him instinctively. He wheeled back round to go to Josh’s aid, only to find that the person who had pushed him out of the way to launch a murderous attack, appeared not to be the Neanderthal ex-grad student but the White House Deputy Chief of Staff. Josh had the guy who had been speaking last in a chokehold and showed every sign of breaking his back on the bar. Supposing he didn’t throttle him first. “Josh…!” Sam gasped in shock.

Toby was nursing his fist while standing over a guy who was lying flat on his back with blood running from his nose and Mallory was viciously spraying Mace into the eyes of the third, who was blindly trying to wave her off. “Toby!” Sam heard himself squeak in a strangled yelp. “Mallory!” As he tried to go forward, Charlie tightened his grip on him.

“You need to stay out of this, Sam.”

“But they’re…” As Sam watched, Mallory brought up her knee hard into a place that made his eyes water in sympathy, and, as the guy hit the ground, now curled up and wailing with tears pouring from his eyes from the spray, CJ brought down her stiletto heel in a place that made him scream. 

Toby was beckoning to the guy on the floor, who appeared to be coughing on his own blood. Toby snatched up a barstool. “Please, do get up, I would really like an excuse to hit you with a chair.”

Josh looked nothing like himself; the expression on his face was simply murderous and he was digging his fingers in a choke hold at the throat of the man he was bending back across the bar, even though the guy’s eyes were bulging.

“Josh!” Sam struggled loose from Charlie’s restraining grip and grabbed his arm. “Josh, you’re killing him!”

Ignoring him, Josh gazed into the guy’s bloodshot eyes. “What was that you said? What should they have done to my friend, you worthless little shit?”

“Josh!” With a superhuman effort, Sam yanked Josh’s right hand away from the man’s throat; letting him gasp in a desperately needed lungful of air. “Stop it! Josh? Stop it!” 

There was a second when he thought he was going to have to hit Josh over the head with a bottle to save him from a murder indictment, and then Josh snatched a shaky breath and snatched his left hand away from the guy’s throat. Josh took a step backwards and sucked in air as if he had been held underwater, lungful after lungful of oxygen while Sam imagined the sound of Josh’s blood pounding in his brain, his heartbeat a cacophony thumping in his ears. 

“They shot him,” Sam snarled at the guy choking for breath on the bar. “And they shot me. And we don’t find it funny or cute or okay to joke about it, and you’d probably be wise to leave now and to take your friends with you.”

“And never come back.” Charlie still had a hand on Sam’s arm and, as the choking one on the bar lurched to his feet, met his gaze. “Don’t even think about touching him or talking to him or looking at him. Clear?”

Sam was poised to block a punch, but to his surprise, the guy just dropped his gaze, muttered something, and shuffled away. The other two scrambled unsteadily to their feet, the one with blood pouring from his nose, the other half-blinded and walking in a hunched, crab-like fashion, and tottered after him, also without a word.

Josh was still snatching in air and Sam put a hand on his arm. “Josh, it’s okay,” he said gently.

“It’s not okay. It’s not okay that they took you or that they held a gun to your head or that they could have killed you just like _that_ …!” At that protesting gasp from CJ and perhaps at the look in Sam’s eyes, Josh collected himself and swallowed. “I’m sorry, Sam.”

“The people who did that are dead, Josh.” Sam tightened his grip on his arm. 

“I nearly lost you.”

“I know.” Sam rubbed his arm helplessly. “I know exactly what that feels like.”

“They could have killed you.”

“I know. I really do know.”

For the first time a recognisably ‘Josh’ expression returned to his face and he reached out to cup Sam’s face in his hand. “I know you know.”

Sam smiled. “I know you know I know.”

After a moment Josh also managed a smile. He let his arm fall to his side. “This is getting a little ‘Lion in Winter’.”

“Well, like the Plantagenets, we’re a knowledgeable family. In fact the combined IQ of our party would probably add up to quite a large number.”

Toby put down the bar stool he had picked up in some embarrassment. “Yes, indeed. And I like to think that we demonstrated that tonight.”

“ _I_ demonstrated that tonight,” Mallory pointed out. “I’m the only one who didn’t resort to brute force and ignorance.”

“You kneed a guy in the testicles, Mallory,” Josh observed. “I’m not seeing the necessity for a membership to Mensa in that particular action.”

“But I first made sure to incapacitate him with pepper spray. That showed finesse.”

Josh snatched another breath and turned to CJ. “And don’t even try to tell me that stamping on a guy’s nuts has an IQ requirement.”

“Oh, and getting a thug in a chokehold does?”

“Is everyone okay?”

Sam turned to find Ron Butterfield regarding them anxiously, flanked by agents who, while keeping their weapons holstered, were, in stance and build, just screaming ‘secret service agents with guns’ to every open-mouthed grad student and co-ed in the crowded bar. 

Sam cleared his throat. “It’s fine, Ron.”

“The bartender just called the police – said there was a fight of some kind going on.”

He and Josh exchanged a look. Charlie said, “It’s okay now.”

“You weren’t involved?” Ron’s gaze went immediately to Sam.

“Oh, we were totally involved,” CJ admitted.

“But we won.” Toby did not entirely manage to banish the pride from his voice.

“By a comfortable margin,” Mallory added. “Of course, there were more of us.”

Sam winced apologetically at Ron and indicated his companions. “They’re just still a little…jumpy.”

Ron nodded at once. “Perfectly understandable. I’ll go and sort it out with the police. Do you want the guys arrested?”

“We actually beat _them_ up,” Josh admitted a little sheepishly.

“But they attacked you first?” Ron confirmed.

CJ cleared her throat. “Well – they said mean things to Sam.”

“Very mean things,” Toby added.

Ron looked a little rocked back on his heels by that. He opened his mouth to remonstrate and then turned to Sam. “Explain it to them.”

“I promise,” Sam assured him.

“I’ll make sure they don’t press charges. Just make certain they understand…”

“I will.” Sam waited until Ron and the other agents had gone before turning back to Josh. “You’re not allowed to hit people just because they say mean things to me.”

Josh looked mutinous. “That makes no sense to me at all.”

“Nevertheless, it’s actually the law of the land.” He turned to Toby. “That goes for you, too. And, CJ and Mallory, I don’t think I even need to start on how bad and wrong your behavior was.”

“No,” CJ sighed. “We know.”

Sam looked levelly at Charlie. “And, Charlie, I expect more from you.”

Charlie shrugged. “I was going to help you pull Josh off…eventually.”

“The guy’s tongue was turning blue.”

“Brain death takes five minutes after loss of consciousness. There was plenty of time.”

Sighing, Sam began to herd his companions towards the exit, fresh air, and the inevitable reprimand from Leo and the President.

 

It was late and Sam thought he was probably not the only one who was a little bit hung over. Now the adrenaline high had worn off there was a general sense of…well, mostly of being in a great deal of trouble; an impression not removed by the way Leo and President Bartlet had taken the news – called in from Ron Butterfield – about the disturbance and their part in it. Walking back into the White House had been painfully similar to trying to sneak back into college after curfew only to find the headmaster waiting for them carrying a cane. “In the Oval Office. Now,” Leo had snapped ominously. “You too, Mallory.” They filed in meekly to be greeted by a series of questions that possibly were or were not rhetoric regarding their sanity and ability to be let out without keepers, and the more gentle ministrations of Mrs Bartlett and her medical kit.

“Were you out of your minds?” Leo demanded again. 

“I already asked that question,” President Bartlet put in. “At least twice.”

Abby looked up from where she was icing Toby’s hand. “You can’t blame them for being a little protective, Jed.”

“They work in the White House,” Leo pointed out. “They can’t just get into a brawl in a Georgetown bar and it not be in all the papers tomorrow. CJ, tell me there were no reporters in that bar?”

“Much as I would love to tell you that, Leo, I have to admit that there were, in fact, a considerable number of reporters in that bar. On the upside, them writing a story about Josh and Toby and the rest of us trying to kill some annoying people who were rude to Sam may stop them printing a story about Josh and Sam having sex, Sam charging three thousand dollars a night for his sexual services, or Mallory not being a woman of her word.”

President Bartlet looked at Charlie. “You didn’t try to stop Josh and Toby?”

“I was protecting Sam.”

“Protecting Sam from what? By the sound of things, he was in no danger, on account of the fact that Josh, Toby, CJ and Mallory – of whom I must say I expected better – were all in the process of _killing_ the people who were rude to him.”

“But you heard what Charlie said, Jed,” Abby pointed out. “They were the same people who picked on Zoey that time.”

“They said mean things,” Josh repeated stolidly.

The President gave him a look of exasperation. “You can’t possibly think that’s an excuse.”

“No, it’s just a reason.” Josh regarded him levelly. “If it gets into the press that the rest of us are a little bit twitchy on account of psychopathic racists having kidnapped Sam and nearly killed him I would expect the response of the thinking members of the general public to be ‘well, duh’. Would any sane person expect us _not_ to be a little twitchy?”

“He does have a point, Jed,” Abby pointed out.

Her husband glared at her. “Can you stop taking their side?”

“You heard what Josh said – those people were mean to Sam.”

“There is no law that makes it a capital offence to be mean to Sam. I’m not saying that it’s not an oversight on the part of those who devise the laws of this land, but nevertheless it remains a fact that no such law exists.”

“You could always pass one, Daddy,” Zoey offered.

Her father looked at her in disbelief. “Why are you here?”

“I’m lending support to CJ and Mallory.”

“Well, do it from another room.”

“Jed…” Abby Bartlet gave him a reproachful look and then turned to look at Sam. Her voice was gentle as she asked: “Are you okay?”

“Yes, thank you, Mrs Bartlet.”

“Do you want me to call Dr. Keyworth?”

“No, I’m really okay.”

“I should probably give you a check-up just to be on the safe side. Toby, keep the ice on that until the swelling goes down. You’re lucky nothing’s broken.” She expertly wrapped a towel around the ice pack. 

“Thank you, Doctor Bartlet,” Toby murmured a little sheepishly.

“Sam, why don’t you come and sit down and let me check your blood pressure.”

“He’s actually the only one whose blood pressure didn’t hit the danger mark tonight,” Toby admitted. “The rest of us were the ones who kind of…lost it.”

Zoey said quietly: “Why don’t you ask Josh what those people said, Daddy?”

Her father gave her another look of exasperation while his wife fussed over Sam, gently wrapping the blood pressure cuff around his arm and beginning to inflate it. “Because it isn’t relevant. Because there is no point in… Okay, what did they say?”

Josh snatched a breath. “Paraphrasing for the sake of Zoey and Mrs. Bartlet, Mr. President, they said that they spent every day while Sam was kidnapped hoping he was being gang-raped by the Ku Klux Klan, and that they wished the people who had kidnapped him had shot him in the head once they were done with him.”

There was a moment of silence in which Zoey just gazed levelly at her father. President Bartlet swallowed. “I see.”

Leo said: “That’s no excuse for…” then trailed off to breathe rapidly through his nose. “It’s still no excuse for…” He looked over at the President helplessly.

President Bartlet cleared his throat. “As Leo said, that’s still no excuse for… Oh, to hell with it, of course they were going to punch those guys out after that, Leo, what do you expect?”

“I’m not saying they weren’t provoked, I’m saying it’s a PR disaster.”

“Are you saying you _wouldn’t_ have hit those guys if they’d said that to Sam in front of you?”

Leo rolled his eyes. “Of course I would have hit them. With the first blunt instrument that came to hand and I probably wouldn’t have stopped until they were a nasty stain on the floor. That’s not the issue here. The issue is that Josh should have known he’s not in a fit mental state to accompany Sam to anywhere where people might possibly be….”

“Mean to him?” Mallory suggested.

“Exactly.” Leo turned on Josh. “Don’t take Sam into bars until you can deal – with equanimity – with people saying…mean things to him.”

CJ cleared her throat. “Uh, Leo, Josh has never been able to deal with people saying mean things to Sam. The one time President Bartlet did it – when he was still Governor Bartlet – Josh said he was a…”

“So he did.” Abby nodded and then patted Sam on the shoulder. “Your blood pressure’s fine, Sam.”

“Of course, his blood pressure’s fine,” President Bartlet retorted. “He’s the only guy in the room with normal blood pressure right now.” He turned to Josh. “They flat out said that? They _said_ that?”

“Yes, sir, they really did.”

“And Toby hit the one guy hard?”

“Very hard, sir. Although that was as nothing to what Mallory and CJ did. That guy is going to be walking funny for a very long time.”

“You weren’t really trying to kill that guy, were you?”

“Yes, sir, I really was. I wanted to see his eyeballs pop.”

Sam gazed at Josh in horror. “Josh…”

Leo rolled his eyes. “Oh, like you had warm fuzzy feelings towards the people who shot Josh.”

“That was different.”

“Why?”

“Because that was me feeling it.” Sam looked anxiously at his friend. “Josh, you’re not a murderer and you don’t want to be one.”

Josh sighed. “I know.”

“And you have to promise me you will never ever do that again, whatever anyone says or does.”

Josh sighed again. “Sam…”

“Sticks and stones, Josh! You can’t honestly think that taking a human life is commensurate with someone saying something unpleasant – quite apart from the fact that you believe in free speech. You don’t believe in capital punishment and you know perfectly well that violence is not the way to deal with ignorance and hatred or even three stupid, drunken, but ultimately harmless grad students. Now, promise me!”

Josh gazed up at Sam with an exasperation that almost immediately turned into defeat. “Okay, okay. I promise. No more killing people who annoy me. But, I’ve got to tell you, you’re really stepping on my fun here.”

Sam summoned his sternest expression and turned to Toby. “And, if you’ve quite finished floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee…?”

Toby held up his ice-pack wrapped fist. “I hereby cancel my bid for the middleweight championship.”

“CJ…?”

“I was grossly provoked,” she insisted. “Of course I’m not going to settle any more disputes with my heels. That would be absurd. Unless the people involved are very annoying.”

“CJ!”

She rolled her eyes. “Cross my heart and hope to die, I’ll be good.”

Leo fixed his daughter with a stern eye. “Mallory.”

“Girls just want to have fun, Dad.”

“You got into a brawl in a bar! I’m an _alcoholic_ and I never did that.”

“I felt it was time someone in the family did. Okay, I give you my word I won’t knee anyone else in the testicles unless I’m severely provoked or in a really bad mood that day.”

Leo turned to President Bartlet with a shrug. “Mal’s a redhead. I don’t think we’re going to get anything more binding than that.” 

The President looked at Charlie. “I’m very disappointed in you, Charlie. I expected better of you. When I permit you all – with lofty beneficence – to take an evening off from the trials and tribulations of affairs of state – I don’t expect drama to ensue. I don’t expect brawling. I don’t expect that my Communications Officer is going to need an ice pack or that my Deputy Chief of Staff will narrowly escape a murder rap. And you know why I don’t expect this? Because I send you, who I look upon as a son, not to mention a ray of commonsense in a foolish world, to ensure that order is maintained.”

“I’m sorry, sir.” Charlie looked suitably repentant. 

President Bartlet sighed. “Well, I should probably fire most, if not all, of you, but it’s very difficult to get new staff at three a.m. so I’ll restrict my comments to telling you that if any one of you gets themselves into that situation again you will not have a job to come back to. And, Josh, learn your limitations. As anyone who knows you knows, you are going to overreact like a psychopath on crack if anyone threatens one hair on Sam’s shiny little head right now. And you should therefore avoid situations which might unwittingly lead to me having to sign a presidential pardon to rescue you from a lethal injection. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir.” Josh grimaced. “I’m sorry, Mr. President, it won’t happen again.”

“It really had better not.” Bartlet turned to look at Sam who immediately felt as if he would like to sink through the floor. “As for you, Samuel…”

“Sir, Sam didn’t do anything,” Josh said at once. “He was just buying some drinks. He didn’t provoke those guys in any way.”

“That’s true, sir,” Charlie said at once. “Sam didn’t do or say anything to cause that situation. Those guys were just looking to get even for what happened last time.”

As Mallory, Toby and CJ also chimed in with assurances of Sam’s innocence, the President looked over at his wife. “Perhaps everyone _except_ Sam needs to start seeing Dr. Keyworth?”

She shrugged. “You have to expect some residual trauma.”

President Bartlet turned back to Sam. “You do know this is all your fault, right? This is all a direct consequence of you running in the California 47th – a stupid idea, of which I never approved. Thanks to you I now have a staff who are all suffering from PTSD and will kill complete strangers who offer you an unkind word. What are you going to do about it?”

Sam looked a round the room, filled with people whom he loved, and whom he had certainly received ample proof loved him, and couldn’t help a smile breaking through. “I’m going to stay here and serve at the pleasure of the President, sir.”

Bartlet reached out and pulled Sam into a brief embrace. “Good answer.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Now, run along home and try to avoid getting mugged or in any way kidnapped. Incidentally, Josh, at some point you either need to out yourself as gay or move back into your own apartment or the media are going to start to talk.”

“Sam and Josh both decided to become gay tonight,” Mallory put in helpfully. 

“Apparently they’re a little hazy on the logistics as yet,” CJ added. “But they’re going to research the practicalities, possibly submit a paper or two, before putting the proposal to committee. They’re expecting to move onto the actual process of having sexual intercourse around 2010. Can I say ‘sexual intercourse’ in the Oval Office?”

The President blinked. “I think I speak for everyone here when I say how much I’d prefer it if you didn’t.”

Leo sighed. “Josh, Sam, not that we won’t support your interesting new lifestyle choice, but if you could both stay in the closet until after the next election, I think the Democratic Party would appreciate it.”

“I don’t think they’ve made it as far as the closet yet, Leo,” Toby pointed out. “They’re still trying to find the road map leading to the closet. Apparently something that men have managed to do without an instruction manual since the Stone Age is beyond them without the assistance of a training film of some kind.”

Josh looked at Sam. “If all we’re going to get is mockery, I think we should return to the barren shores of heterosexuality.”

“I agree.” Sam gazed across at Leo. “Leo, do I have permission to date your daughter?”

Leo looked at him aghast. “Of course not.”

“She defended my honour with a shoe; I think in some cultures that may already make us man and wife.”

“Don’t be so unreasonable, Leo,” Abby protested. “Any parent should be grateful to have Sam as a son-in-law.”

Leo glared at her. “That’s easy for you to say, he’s not asking to date one of your daughters.”

“He’s a nice boy, Leo.”

“He’s Sam Seaborn. Trouble follows him. Every time we have some official gathering, the wife of some obscure foreign dignitary says something inappropriate to him after Sam has thought he was indulging in idle chit chat and she’s planning an elopement. He’s also slept with a call girl and almost married a woman who would probably have devoured their young. And if I did give my permission for him and Mallory to date and they subsequently broke up, I would probably be required by the ancient codes of conduct to which all fathers must conform, to disembowel him with a salad fork. Also, he’s gay and having an unconsummated affair with Josh Lyman.”

“He’s still studying to be gay, he hasn’t actually learned the technique yet. And all men spend their lives having unconsummated affairs with their best friends,” Abby said dismissively. “It doesn’t mean anything. Well, except when they consummate them, then it usually means divorce. But, is there any evidence that Mallory even wants marriage in this case anyway? I think she’s just got an itch she wants to scratch.”

Josh held up a hand. “I want to formally lodge a protest against Sam being used as a scratching post for Mallory’s itches.”

Sam also held up a hand. “And I want to formally lodge the declaration that I don’t mind.”

“Please, go away now,” President Bartlet pleaded. 

“Yes, Mr. President,” they chorused obediently. 

As they shuffled out of the room in subdued guilt, Abby could be heard saying: “You know you really ought to apologize to the girls, Jed.”

“Why?”

“All those years when you told them that sons would have been so much less trouble – don’t you think it’s time you admitted you were wrong…?”

Josh focused on his watch with difficulty as the door of the Oval Office was closed behind them. “I think we have four hours until Senior Staff.”

“It’s Saturday tomorrow, Josh,” Sam pointed out gently. “In fact, it’s Saturday today.”

Josh put his head back in ecstasy. “Oh bliss, oh heaven, oh take me to my bed right now.”

Zoey leaned across to kiss Sam on the cheek. “They do get better,” she whispered in his ear. “You just have to give them time.” She looked at Charlie, who didn’t seem to know over which of them to hover protectively first. “Do you want to walk me home? It’s at least a hundred feet away.”

He held out his arm gallantly and she took it at once, beaming at him, and throwing a goodbye to the rest of them over her shoulder.

“You’re sure you’re okay?” Toby asked Sam.

Sam thought that the President was correct in the assumption that he was the only one who hadn’t had his blood pressure spike into the danger level, but he only nodded and patted Toby gently on the arm. “Thanks for the – you know – insane homicidal overreaction, guys.”

“Oh, any time, Spanky.” CJ patted him gently on his good shoulder before making a somewhat uneven retreat. Toby caught up with her and she slipped her arm through his.

“I’m just sayin’ – for a beautiful woman, she does look a little giraffe-like at times,” Josh muttered defensively.

Mallory stood in front of Sam and straightened his jacket for him. “I’m giving you permission, Sam, to take me to the opera on Monday night.”

“Do I need to book the tickets?”

“Already done.”

“Is it – perchance – Chinese opera?”

“No, it’s Italian. It’s very romantic, and I may cry. You will be expected to provide a clean handkerchief and dinner. There will, of course, be no sex of any kind for you at the end of the evening. I give you my word on that.”

Sam blinked at her in confusion. “But you said you weren’t a woman of your word.”

“I know.” She beamed at him. “That’s why – if I were you – I would wear clear underwear.”

“I always do,” Sam protested.

“I can confirm that,” Josh observed. “Also that he packs like a girl.”

Mallory brushed some specks from Sam’s jacket. “See, you’ve almost got the gay thing down. In the meantime I give you permission to dabble in heterosexuality by taking me to see _La Traviata_ on Monday – I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty, from here, where I will expect you to be wearing formal evening dress and looking excessively handsome.”

“I’ll do my best on all counts,” Sam assured her airily.

Then, finally, Mallory was gone, and Josh was tugging at his arm, and they were in an elevator, briefly in the open air, and then, at last, in a car and being driven home, and there was a very real possibility that he might be able to enjoy many hours of uninterrupted dreamless sleep.

***

“Sam…?”

Sam woke with a jolt, gunfire fading to sirens, the white walls of the ambulance blurring into his bedroom and the soft glow of lamplight. “Josh…?”

He looked around in shock only to find the man already sitting on his bed. Josh winced at his expression. “Are you okay? Were you dreaming about the cellar again?”

Sam blinked at the light. “I was dreaming about when you were shot.”

“You still dream about that?”

“Yeah. Don’t you?”

Josh shook his head. “Almost never.”

Sam sat up awkwardly, running a hand through his hair. “Did you dream about Joanie? Should I make cocoa?”

A smile spread slowly over Josh’s face. “I’m going to miss this – when I go back home. I’m going to miss being able to talk to you in the middle of the night.”

“I’m going to miss it too,” Sam admitted.

“Having to wait for the shower in the morning and finding other bristles in the sink that aren’t mine – that I’m not going to miss. Also, you eat way too much salad.”

“One is supposed to eat five units of fruit or vegetables a day.”

“Yes, but no one ever does except for weirdos. And you eat more than five units. You eat seven or eight.”

“I’m trying to avoid catching a cold. There’s a lot of vitamin C in fruit and vegetables.” Sam looked at Josh’s face. “Josh, what’s wrong?”

Josh swallowed. “I nearly killed a guy tonight. It didn’t…I didn’t even… At the time, it felt like the right thing to do. I mean – I knew it was wrong, but it felt as if that was irrelevant, as if it not only didn’t bother me but never would.”

Sam gazed at him levelly. “And now it does?”

Josh nodded. “Dear God, yes. I could have… When I think about what I… If you hadn’t pulled me off him.”

“Josh, I know you better than you know yourself and you would have stopped. You’re not a murderer and you would not have killed that man.”

“I’m not so sure. It really felt like that was what I wanted to do.”

“Trust me, you wouldn’t have done it.” 

Josh drew a deep shuddering breath. “I think I used to be someone else. In fact, I know I was. I was someone else before my sister died. I was someone with an older sister, who was kind of annoying sometimes, and who played Ave Maria too loud, and who was always going to be there. There was no question about that, Joanie was always going to be there. And then I was someone else; I was the boy who didn’t have a sister any more; I was the boy who ran out of the house and whose sister died. I always thought the reason Joanie didn’t get out was probably because she was looking for me. Because that’s what older siblings are always told – that they have to look after their little brother. I always think…”

“It wasn’t your fault.” Sam took his hand in his and squeezed it for emphasis. “You know it wasn’t your fault. You were a little boy, you were eight years old. You ran out of the house. It was the right thing to do and if you hadn’t done that your parents would have lost both their children.”

“But I was someone else after that happened. And then I was maybe someone else before I lost my virginity, because it wasn’t a big deal and yet at the same time it was huge, because I wasn’t someone who just wondered what it was like to sleep with a girl, I was someone who had. And I was someone else once I’d had my first relationship and I was someone else before and after graduation. That’s what I would have said anyway. That all those little transitions you go through, they all change you a little bit, but the fire was a Rubicon and once I’d crossed it I could never go back and be that little boy again. It was the same after the shooting. I woke up and all I knew was that I was alive. And I looked like me, and I sounded like me, and I obviously looked like me to everyone else, but I wasn’t me any more; there were pieces missing. Like when they performed the surgery, they took something out and forgot to put it back in, and it was the piece that told me that the world was okay.” Josh met Sam’s gaze. “And I meant to tell you, before, that I know how that feels, and it gets better. And I don’t mean you go back to who you were before. You’re someone else, but it’s still okay, you’re just the you that exists after that event, but you are…you.”

“Thank you,” Sam said softly.

Josh tightened his grip on his fingers. “But, what I also didn’t tell you is that when you got kidnapped – when Leo told me… I didn’t cope very well. I didn’t cope at all, really. I just kept lying to myself. I kept telling myself all these things I knew weren’t true so I wouldn’t have to deal with the fact that if you were dead, like that, taken by those people, and maybe tortured, and murdered… I couldn’t ever be me again. I couldn’t ever believe in anything or feel it was worthwhile. Because we were never going to win, because there’s a reason why when you play paper-rock-scissors that no player is ever allowed to pull out a gun. Because a bullet would always win.”

“Scales,” Sam returned quietly.

“What?”

“There would be a new game. Bullet-Scales-Pen. A bullet may beat the pen and, metaphorically, the guy who’s holding the pen, but it can’t beat justice as represented by the scales, and if the scales aren’t ever enough to beat the bullet, the pen would find a way to make the scales weigh justice better.”

Josh considered the point for a moment. “It’s not as catchy as ‘rock-paper-scissors’.”

Sam conceded the point with a nod. “True. Josh, you think it would have destroyed you, because you’re so close to it, you’re consumed with how it felt, but the truth is you felt just like this when you lost your sister. You thought you would never get up in the morning again and nothing had any meaning any more. And I felt like this when I thought you were dead, that if you didn’t survive, I couldn’t go on. And I felt like it again when I found out the father, who I loved and respected and who been my role model and the guy I most wanted to make proud of me, had been living a lie all this time. The man who had told me to always tell the truth, even if the truth was painful, had been telling me a thousand lies. But the truth is, you do get up again. There is no tragedy so destructive that we don’t get up again. That’s what the human race is. It’s who we are. Even if I had died in that place, you would have believed there were still things worth fighting for. And if I got hit by a truck tomorrow, in a month you will have found a way to make it safer for other people to cross the road.”

Josh drew a long shuddering breath. “It’s too close to nearly losing Donna. That was a few hours and they were…endless. And I kept thinking that she couldn’t be dead; there couldn’t be this Donna-sized hole in my life in which only she could fit. And I was lucky, because she made it. And when they took you – I kept thinking maybe Zoey and Donna had used up all the available luck. I tried not to think it, but I started thinking I was glad no one had given me the choice, because I might have traded Zoey for Donna. I might have…”

“You think I didn’t think if it came down to you or the President – if only one of you could survive surgery – that I wouldn’t have traded him in a heartbeat for you? And you think I don’t know how crappy that makes one feel, when you would do that, to someone you love, who loves you, some insane barter with a God you don’t even believe in, because there is someone who matters so much…” Sam sighed. “Josh, the real reason you’re here tonight is because you scared yourself half to death. But you didn’t nearly kill that guy because you’ve been a murderer all this time and you just didn’t know it. You nearly killed him because you really need therapy.” 

Josh grinned at him. “You’re not comforting me as you should.”

“You know it makes sense. You know how I know?”

“Because we’re a knowledgeable family?”

“Because when you came out of surgery and they told me you were going to be okay and I had some time and space in which I could be something other than panic-stricken and terrified, I was so angry I thought my head was going to explode. It didn’t make me a mass murderer, even though I thought I would have danced around the flames of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan HQ if their building had been on fire with every one of them inside it. The truth is, I would have helped fill buckets, and so would you. And if – two minutes after – that guy you tried to choke in the bar had been hit by a car, you would have been the guy calling the ambulance and telling him everything was going to be okay. Because we are not like those people. We just have bad days sometimes.”

Josh laughed. “This was a bad day?”

“It was a bad day.”

“You were really that angry?”

Sam half-laughed. “Oh boy, Josh, there are no words for how angry I was. That’s how I know you need therapy. And I think we should have a double session where I talk about how I’m being smothered by your over-protective behavior and you talk about how, deep down, you really blame me for walking towards the car.”

Josh looked at him sideways. “You know about that then?”

Sam nodded. “I guessed.”

“Because I haven’t said anything. And I notice you haven’t said anything about the whole smothering thing either, until now.”

“We’ve both been very restrained. Which, is possibly not a good thing as it could lead to outbursts of violent behavior in public places.”

Josh shook his head. “Nah, it would never happen.” He kept his fingers laced through Sam’s. “You’re right about the therapy. I could probably do with a session or two.”

“I know you’re angry with me for getting kidnapped. Like it’s an accumulation of all the times I’ve bumped into walls and fallen off boats and assumed someone is an okay guy when really they’re not, and you’re angry with you, because you actually always found all those little traits of mine kind of cute and all the time they were this big red flag.”

Josh regarded him levelly. “And you know this because?”

“Because I was angry with you for not ducking. I hit the ground, I had time to pull CJ down too. How come you just stood there and let them shoot you?” Sam sighed. “So, I know.”

“I have never found those little traits of yours ‘cute’.”

“Admit it, you think they’re adorable.”

That grin from Josh looked as if it couldn’t be suppressed. “Yeah, okay. I admit there may have been the occasional indulgent smile. But that’s over now, okay? That’s _way_ in the past. And I can’t believe you were pissed with me for getting shot.”

“Like it’s fair to be pissed with me for getting kidnapped at gunpoint?”

“And isn’t making a mental trade-off with God involving the life of the President High Treason of some kind? Couldn’t you, in fact, be hanged?”

“You think trading off the life of the President’s daughter is a fifty dollar fine and some penalty points?”

Reluctantly, Josh slipped his fingers loose and then reached out to ruffle Sam’s hair. “I’m doing this because it’s annoying, and because I’m older than you, and also because I’m glad you’re not dead.”

Sam grinned as he smoothed down his hair. “And I got all of that. And don’t ever do it again.”

Josh sighed. “I’m definitely going to miss this. You don’t mind if I call you up at three in the morning to check that you’re not having more of a life than me, do you?”

“I probably will, but I’ll keep it to myself with tremendous self-restraint.”

“You’re really going through with this whole dating Mallory thing?”

“I hope so. If Leo doesn’t find a way to prevent it, I would very much like to have an actual bona fide date with Mallory, preferably with no interruptions. Why don’t you book two more tickets and bring Donna?”

“Donna’s dating Patrick.”

“And this prevents you from taking her to the opera, why? She would enjoy it. She would look fabulous, and she and Mallory would have someone to talk to in the interval who wasn’t us. It wouldn’t be a date, as she’s dating someone else, it would be a night out with friends.”

“What if people assume that you and I are there as a couple and Mallory and Donna are there as a couple?”

“Any straight men who happen to be at the opera that night can have a very happy time fantasizing about Donna and Mallory.”

Josh sniffed. “Okay. Do you think any gay men there would fantasize about you and me?”

“I think it’s customary for gay men attending a performance of _La Traviata_ to fixate on the soprano singing Violetta and remain oblivious of their fellow audience members.”

Josh frowned. “That seems odd to me.”

“To me, too, but I understand it’s traditional.”

“It’s not like she’s going to be Maria Callas.”

“No, indeed.”

“I just think that if it comes down to you and me or a three hundred pound soprano pretending to be consumptive that you and I ought to get the nod in a gay fantasy.” There was a pause as Josh thought longer. “There was a dress Donna wore once, which I really liked, and I told her she should buy, but I don’t know if she did. But if she did, it would be perfect for the opera.”

“You should tell her that.”

“You’re not just scared of being alone with Mallory?”

Sam blinked. “Why should I be scared of Mallory?”

“Well, she’s kind of formidable, and she knows how to wield a pepper spray, not to mention use her knee with lethal force. I think you’re actually a little scared of her.”

“Like you weren’t scared of Amy?”

Josh shifted uncomfortably. “I think it’s something women do to make men find them more…sexually alluring.”

“Frighten us?”

“You don’t find CJ even sexier than usual when she’s bawling you out?”

Sam considered the point. “I think I find CJ sexy pretty much all the time. But I don’t remember her bawling me out.”

“Oh, man, you missed out there. Last time she yelled at me I just couldn’t stop thinking about how she must look naked.”

“You probably shouldn’t tell her that if you want to – you know – live.”

“No, I think I should definitely keep that to myself. So, you’re going to be okay?”

Sam thought about all the patience Donna must have employed over the years and how he really was going to miss Josh horribly when he went back to his apartment, but that he could also imagine times – such as now – when he might not mind quite so much having his own bedroom to himself. “Josh, you woke _me_ up.”

“Oh yeah.” Josh got to his feet. “Well, sleep tight. Don’t have bad dreams, or – you know – attempt to leave the building.”

Sam smiled. “Goodnight, Josh.” The man was at the door, before Sam added impulsively: “Thank you.”

Josh looked at him in bemusement. “For what?”

“For everything.”

Josh just gazed at him. “Did we ever have the Stranger Danger talk?”

“Get out of here.”

“You know not to take candy from strange men, right?”

“What I’ve never told you is that I’m actually originally from the planet Pluto and I can kill you with my brain.”

“They have chess nerds on Pluto? Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. I always thought it looked kind of geeky, stuck all the way back there by itself, not getting invited into the orbit of the cool planets.”

Sam looked at him for a long moment. “I have no idea right now why I like you as much as I do.”

Josh crossed back over to the bed, bent down and pressed his lips briefly to Sam’s forehead, his fingers very gently brushing through Sam’s dishevelled hair. “That week you were away, and I didn’t know if you were alive or dead, was the longest of my life. Don’t ever do that to me again.”

Sam found that, for all his feeling of inner strength, his eyes were filled with tears as he gazed up at Josh. “I won’t if you won’t.”

Josh gripped his hand briefly. “I’ll learn to duck if you’ll learn to run.”

Sam gripped it back. “It’s a deal.”

Gazing up at Josh, Sam noticed that although the man was smiling, he also had tears in his eyes. “So…” Josh said gently. “How about I get us both some cocoa…?”

##### The End


End file.
